


Until Dawn

by honestys_easy



Category: Music RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - Vietnam, Canon - Music, Developing Relationship, Love Letters, M/M, Vietnam War, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-06 21:05:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 124,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honestys_easy/pseuds/honestys_easy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of love and war set in the era-defining end of the 1960s. When Neal is drafted into the army and leaves his entire life behind him, he keeps a grasp on his friendship with Andy through letters and, inevitably, through music.  But holding onto each other isn't easy in a world on the edge of revolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a work in-progress for about 4 years (wow, I can't believe it's been that long!) And since it's been over a year since I've written anything in it, it's doubtful that it will get finished. But, a few people have asked to read what I have of it, so here it is :-) I am still very proud of the writing I've done in this fic, and I hope you enjoy it, too. And who knows, maybe going through this fic again might give me the inspiration to pick it up again... ;-)
> 
> After the epic scope of Outlaw's Prayer, dreamerren and I were trying to pin down another Anthemic alternate universe idea (because we love nothing more than worldbuilding AUs!) and decided with some deliberation on the 1960s. A tumultuous and divisive time, it ran the gamut from free love to free-fire zones. Music and sex and guns...that seems to be my favorite elements to a chaptered fic ;-) I love playing with the different ages of Neal and Andy in this, as well as their different locales and mindsets.
> 
> A quick note should be made that I am very liberal and loose with interpretation of the life of a GI in the late 60s. Having never written a war story before, I did preliminary research into both army conditions at the time and how other fictional works set in the Vietnam War were written. Ultimately I decided that focusing too much on the real details would detract from the story I was trying to write (and easily bog me down in military minutae). So, with that, take the details of military life in this fic with a grain of salt; conditions and locations are generalized, and--very uncharacteristic of me, lol--historically inaccurate.
> 
> There will be a few other historical references made throughout the story that I'll explain in each chapter as they come up.
> 
> Title credit, of course, goes to MWK for their song "Until Dawn."
> 
> Please enjoy what I have of this story :-)

Andy had not been _running_. The only distance he runs is between the baseline and net, to sweep up drop shots in gym class, and even then the coach berates him for being so lazy about it. He doesn’t run, like Neal doesn’t run, both finding it a waste of time unless they’re being chased, and only if they did something really worth the chasing. If you want to feel the wind on your face and the ground rushing past underneath you, Neal always said, get in the car and drive as far as your tank’ll take you, and you won’t even have to break a sweat.

So no, he wasn’t running; Andy was walking briskly when he reached the house, and that was why he was out of breath and his chest ached on the front steps. He would even admit to jogging, if pressured, but nothing more.

The house--clapboard and colonial brick, pre-war, though that term was controversially obsolete at this point--was on his way to school. It was the only reason he stopped by, after all, even though the high school was another four miles from here, and he never walked there before in his life, he always just waited for Alexis to drive him, or, now, Neal.

Well, he thought, that ache in his chest tightening though he stood perfectly still, not _now_ , anymore.

He bent over, palms on his knees, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal before he knocked. But suddenly the door he thought would wait patiently for him to catch his breath was not as patient as perceived; it swung open, startling Andy upright, as he stared down a wall of army green fatigues in the doorway.

Andy’s eyes must have been wide as fucking 78s, but he didn’t give a damn, not when he lost his breath for an entirely different reason.

***

Neal wasn’t really here. That was his only explanation, that this was some Twilight Zone episode he had fallen asleep while watching, or the _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ people zipped him up in some pod somewhere and none of this was really happening. Or he was dreaming, oversleeping while his mother yelled at him for missing another lecture in the college he flunked out of. Or he fell asleep next to Andy, guitars in their laps, when every muscle in their bodies besides their fingers screamed for rest, or drifted off listening to Neal’s records, or just talking. It happened sometimes.

That was the only explanation he had for himself when he opened the front door to find Andy Skib staring him back in the face, breath caught in his throat, eyes wide like he’d seen a ghost.

Maybe he’s been there and back again, Neal thought abstractly, and he’s already dead.

It felt like the entire world was silent in that moment, Neal startled to motionlessness from the surprise guest at his door, Andy’s eyes trying to reconcile with his brain that Neal’s fatigues were normal now, expected. He had been too busy rationalizing his visit to figure out what he would actually say to Neal once he saw him; he just knew he had to see him.

But when Neal looked into Andy’s eyes, he felt deep in his gut he knew why he was here.

The duffel on Neal’s shoulder dropped with a dull thud against the floor, all of Neal’s belongings packed up into one bag, everything he owned wrapped in green canvas. Almost everything. “Mom,” he shouted into the house, never pulling his gaze away from Andy. “Don’t start the car yet; I need a minute.”

***

Almost two decades old and the treehouse was showing its age: bare wooden beams weathered to gray, sprigs of leaves poking into the windows, through the slats. Tucked back into a wooded area the family probably never had rights to build on, it had been the home of Neal’s childhood: the crow’s nest of a pirate ship, the secret lair of Communist spies, a soldier’s outpost. If Andy were nine again he would envy Neal to no end; but these childhood memories were Neal’s and Neal’s alone, the pair having only met a year ago, and the playtimes of men were quite different from those of boys.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Andy mumbled as he hoisted himself up the makeshift ladder, planks of wood nailed into the trunk, tricky even for the most limber of children to scale.

“Shut your mouth,” called Neal from above him, taking his well-worn path up the tree one rung at a time. His palm made contact with the floor of the treehouse and he let himself in. “You’re three years younger’n _me_. What the fuck does that make me?”

There was a playful tap against Neal’s combat boot before he disappeared into the treehouse; as he looked down, Andy’s grin greeted him like always. “Ancient.”

They both reached the top, Neal in better shape than Andy--perhaps he should consider adding a bit of running to an exercise regimen. The grand, spacious play area of Neal’s youth had grown smaller, or him bigger: the old wood creaked and groaned, feebly threatening to give out underneath them, and the space was cramped for two grown men to fit inside. Neal backed his way into the corner to allow Andy enough room to get inside, and still there was little space for comfort between them, their knees touching as their backs were against the wall.

“Should go down to the draft board and tell them that,” Neal cracked a smile. “My best friend says I’m old as dirt, I can’t possibly be what Uncle Sam’s looking for.”

The light faded from Andy’s face, dropped down to the grassy ground well beneath them. “That’s not funny.”

“No...no, I guess it’s not.”

Reaching into his pocket, Neal procured his cigarettes and a box of matches, pursing it between naked lips. His piercings had to go, his tattoos must be covered, but at least the army still allowed him this one vice. He breathed in a deep gulp of the acrid smoke, filling his lungs with a calming familiarity, and tossed the match out the treehouse window without caring if it was still lit. It might have ignited the underbrush below them, consumed he and Andy both in a terrible fire, and at least then they’d both be free of what was to come.

He waited to hear the crackling of fire, smell the bounty of a forest fire from that one little match, but there was no such luck. Turning to Andy, he spoke around the lit cigarette, insisting to himself it was the smoke that made his vision blurry. “Why are you here, Skib?” he asked, wincing at how harsh his own voice sounded in that moment.

It took Andy by surprise, jumping slightly, his cheeks tinged with pink. He ducked his head to mask it, running a hand through his short hair nervously, but to no avail. “Was on my way to school,” he mumbled, unable to even convince himself.

“Bullshit.” He exhaled, a deep layer of smoke hanging between them. Neal didn’t want to pull the cigarette from his lips, or else Andy might notice how his fingers were trembling. “You weren’t taking no leisurely stroll out here. And fuck if you’d ever get your ass up early to walk to that shithole.” His lip curled at the thought of his old high school; moving from one kind of prison to another. “Why’d you come here? What the fuck do you want?”

“I wanted to see you.” Neal wasn’t the only one with bite in that treehouse. When Andy looked up his eyes were hard and challenging, refusing to be chastised by Neal’s temper. Reaching over, he plucked the cigarette from Neal’s lips, stealing the defensive barrier away from him. He took a drag of his own, but as the smoke entered his inexperienced lungs he fought not to cough, struggling to hold his ground. It extinguished the fire out of his voice, though, and all it left him with was sincerity, and a thin layer of hurt. “Why are you being such an asshole?”

The hard shell of a smart-mouthed soldier faded away; there was no point in keeping a stoic front against Andy, Neal knew he could see right through it every time. “Because,” he said, his voice drained, head tilted back against the treehouse wall. “I need to get it all out now.”

He looked over in Andy’s direction and saw the confused look on his friend’s face, and beyond that, outside the window and through the clearing in the woods, his mother’s Rambler in the driveway, waiting to take him away from the only life he’s ever known. “You think they’re gonna let me be an asshole in basic?” He heard the stories from other soldiers, caught rumors wafting through town like the smell of bad eggs. “Recruits like me, they’re worth less than shit and you get treated like it. You’re done for if you mouth off, and face it--” he cracked a pathetic smile, one Andy felt the gravity of too much to return. “--I’m inevitably gonna mouth off.”

But the smile faded once the reality set in. “And even if you listen...even if you’re strong and fast and their perfect little fucking soldier, what do you get?” His voice sounded hollow, final, and Andy silently wished Neal had gone back to being an asshole. “You get shipped off to Vietnam like every other fucker.”

It was the first time Neal had ever said the word aloud to Andy before, a place that felt so far away and impossible if only they never spoke its name. It came rushing to the both of them then, stories and newsreels and newspaper obituaries pressing down on their heads, forcing them into reality. There was as little escape from the truth as there was escape for Neal from his conscripted duty. Men had been leaving for Vietnam for years now, boys barely out of school forced to be soldiers, and they hadn’t been coming back.

“I’d like my cigarette back now,” Neal asked, and silently Andy returned it to his waiting lips.

When Andy found his voice again it was small, but only because they both needed it to be small, a soft, hushed question shared only between them. If there was one person who never made Andy feel small, or young, or immature for his age, it was Neal. “Why didn’t you say any of this last night?”

Last night. The party had been last night, a celebration for Neal and his journey into the jungles of God knows where. There was alcohol and music--Hendrix and Byrds and Cream and Neal even snuck some Jefferson Airplane into the mix--and good friends, and even more alcohol, all things Neal would miss dearly while he was away. It was the third such party they had to orchestrate since the war began, and though their numbers were dwindling, it wouldn’t be the last. Andy hated to wonder if, when it was his turn for a going-away party, there would be any of his friends left to attend.

And last night was the scene of a boisterous, bragging Neal, who held his arms up, mocking shooting a rifle, aiming at phantom Viet Cong in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. A complete turnaround from the Neal before Andy that morning, the fight drained from his blood, like the enemy had already won.

Neal waved a dismissive hand at Andy. “The guys were there,” he said simply, as if it were an explanation as clear as day, but when he looked back in his friend’s direction the only thing clear was Andy’s confusion. He wasn’t sure if he even explained it, Andy would understand; he only hoped he could. “The guys. I can’t tell Nick this, or Travis--especially not Travis, that exempted 4-F motherfucker, I’d never hear the end of it from him--because, you know, they wouldn’t get it. They’d listen, sure, but...they might think I was yellow, or something.”

Andy waited for the immediate follow-up, the confirmation that no, Neal wasn’t yellow, he was gonna be a damn soldier and he wasn’t scared of anything. Even if it wasn’t true, he expected it; but it never came, and maybe, he thought, Neal just didn’t have the luxury to lie anymore. “But you,” Neal’s voice went soft and low; if Andy had the gall to come out there that morning, Neal could at least do him the duty of being truthful. “If I tell you, I know you won’t think that. With you, I’m...” Neal chewed on his lower lip, trying to find the right way to say it, and it left Andy uncomfortable, because Neal always had the right words. “...I’m safe.”

“Because I don’t care,” Andy said.

The look in Neal’s eyes as he corrected him was something Andy had never seen before. “Because you do.”

The air hung heavily between them, a silence that spoke more than all the words they shared the night before. Andy would never care about being yellow, or green, or fucking purple if Neal so chose: the look in his eyes said all of that, defiant and intense, driven to care only about Neal being Neal, no matter what life and the draft board might throw at them. But his presence alone meant more than nothing, the compulsion that kept him up all night to see Neal, to trek down to his house that morning before he left for war. Andy cared, possibly more than he’d ever admit; but if he were to admit it, now would be the time.

The ash crumbled and fell from Neal’s stationary cigarette, turning into a pile of cinders on the treehouse floor. Neal shifted to avoid showing up to the first day of basic with stains on his uniform, and now more than their knees were touching, calf to hip, through denim and army-standard canvas. Shoulder-to-shoulder, Andy was close enough to reach over and rip the sewn-on American flag from Neal’s sleeve, the markings of a recruit; pin him down and force him to stay. But he stayed immobile, and a little ashamed, blushing at his own selfish thoughts.

A poke of Neal’s finger brought his gaze back up to meet his friend’s. “You’re taking care of my guitar, right?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

With wide, sincere eyes Andy nodded, dead serious in his loyalty. Tasked with a request he valued more than anything else in his life, Neal had handed over a bulky guitar case to him the night before, planting Andy in custody of his precious guitar while he was gone. It had to be tuned, polished, the strings never allowed to grow brittle and broken; if Neal was fated to become out of practice because of this damn war, he said, then at least his guitar should stay like new. Andy had protested that Neal’s playing would never go out of sorts, his talent to coax the soul out of those strings would never die; but still he agreed, the guitar coming home with him, laying next to Andy’s in his room, ready to be pampered.

“Of course,” he said. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”

Neal was the one to break their stare, eyes drifting downward, lip between his teeth, biting into the empty piercing holes. What so easily rolled off Andy’s tongue didn’t rest so peacefully in Neal’s bones, the thoughts of returning home from Vietnam a stirring of hope and doubt and bleak knowledge, making it a hard hurdle to cross. He had given the guitar to Andy because he knew his friend would care for it like it was his own. But a deeper part of him, the dark musician who valued his sound more than his life, bequeathed it to him because he knew Andy would care for it still, if the guitar became his own.

He felt the tension spring into Andy’s muscles through their contact. In the next second Neal received a sharp shove against his collarbone, a jolt that was more to shake some sense into him than hurt. When he looked up again Andy’s eyes were waiting, wide and serious, idealist and headstrong. And people thought Neal was the stubborn one.

“You’re coming _back,_ ” he said, louder this time, like he believed if he could say it with enough conviction there would be no choice for it to be true.

But behind that determination Neal saw something deeper, poorly veiled by frustration and glimmers of green accented from the woods and branches around them. Without breaking their gaze he stubbed the cigarette out on the treehouse floor, and asked in a much softer tone than he used before, almost a whisper, that shield of rude bravado broken, unnecessary next to Andy.

“Why are you here?”

He realized the closeness between them with Andy’s shallow breaths, how Neal felt the rise and fall of his body and smelled the minty toothpaste on his breath. He thought of the next time he could be this close to Andy, and he shuddered because fuck, he didn’t have an answer.

Andy searched Neal’s face, looked into the eyes of the friend he had grown so close to in the past year, and tried to fight the crushing weight he felt in his chest. He’d seen other friends go off to basic training, off to war, and he knew in the years ahead he might join them...but none of that felt like this, the reality as hard as the wooden planks of the treehouse around them, and just as fragile. He couldn’t bear to see Neal go but he must; and if he had to leave to a fate unknown, the very least Andy wanted was to have one last chance at goodbye.

His answer was as quiet as Neal’s question, gaze finally meeting with Neal’s, the clear blue in his friend’s eyes rimmed with sadness. “You’re not the only one who’s scared.”

He was reluctant to even blink, to ever stop looking, in the fear that this moment would end, that Neal would punch him on the arm and call him yellow and trot off to war like that morning had never happened. He kept his eyes open, soaking in every bit of color and light, trying to saturate his senses with this one moment, as he heard Neal’s breath catch, watched a flicker of emotion pass in his face. And he kept his eyes open when there was a rustle of canvas, a hand brushing his cheek, and Neal’s lips softly pressing against his.

Time seemed to stand still in that moment, and Neal stopped thinking, stopped worrying over the fog of uncertainty hanging over his head and the months and years and even _seconds_ of his future that he could not control. Thinking was overrated, he concluded this often when faced with teachers’ notes in high school, and then his dismal year of college, complaining that he never applied himself. All he held onto in his mind at that silent, brief moment his lips touched Andy’s, was that he didn’t want to leave, couldn’t leave, without this.

And a moment was all that it lasted, their faces together like a conspiracy, Andy too surprised to close his eyes and relish in the pleasure of the kiss, Neal too anxious to even breathe. He pulled away but only allowing mere inches to come between them, his palm still upon Andy’s cheek, gauging, evaluating. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but Neal knew he had to see it in Andy’s eyes, needed to, before there was no time left to look.

Neal felt the strangest of shivers roll through his body, the softest of sighs escape his lips as he watched Andy scrutinize the situation, take it all in, and slowly close his eyes, leaning in for more. They bridged the gap between them once more, purpose replacing impulse, fully able this time to enjoy and experience the kiss. Neal’s hand inched over to the back of Andy’s neck, pressing their mouths closer together, pushing them deeper into the moment.

But the blaring sound of a car horn cutting into the air was all it took to rip them apart.

Just as it had slowed for them as they ascended the treehouse for their farewells, and stopped to let them relish in a first kiss, time sped up to compensate for the loss, the horn of the Rambler jolting them back into reality. It broke their kiss, cleaving them into two; they could do nothing but stare at one another, unsure, reluctant; terrified.

Neal’s gaze shifted from Andy’s eyes to the window behind him, catching a glimpse of his mother’s car in the driveway, impatiently waiting to take him to the bus station, to basic training, to the rest of his scary, uncertain adulthood. And then came back to his best friend, living so fast in only a short period of time, in the treehouse of his youth into which they could barely fit. Andy’s eyes were larger than Neal had ever seen them, substantial for such expressive eyes as his, searching, pleading for an alternative, for some other way to end this besides watching Neal’s retreating frame.

But his lips said nothing, his mouth silent in begging for a reprieve, for Neal to stay just a little longer to sort things out, sort _them_ out. Andy knew his words could change nothing here, useless words against an entire nation’s war, pleas that would only leave him weak and wanting. He said nothing as the searching in his eyes turned to sadness, mirroring the helplessness he saw in Neal’s.

With nothing further between them, not even a look, a touch of hands that would so desperately pull them into a futile embrace, Neal pulled away, out of the treehouse, down the worn ladder, past the clearing in the woods, into his mother’s car, and away from everything he had ever known.


	2. Chapter 2

> March 8, 1968
> 
> I swear to motherfucking God Andy if I don’t get five goddamn minutes to myself to smoke or shit or jerk off I’m gonna shove an M79 up a fucking sergeant’s asshole.
> 
> Hi, by the way.
> 
> I hope it’s okay to write, I probably should’ve asked beforehand but I figured, hell, who wouldn’t want to get mail from across the country? Maybe if we keep it up I can send them after I’m deployed. We can be pen-pals.
> 
> Fuck, that sounds corny and I don’t have the space on this paper to cross it out. Well, fuck it. You’ll know what I mean.
> 
> It’s just...it’s been two weeks here at basic and I’ve been sending letters back home when I can, telling them I’m doing fine, life’s great here, send food and money--placating bullshit. Makes this place sound like summer camp. I don’t want them to worry, so they get the sanitized version. But I need to tell someone what’s really going on, curse and gripe and yell on the page...basically, I need to be myself. And the first name on my shortlist of people who tolerate me, as myself, was you. If I don’t get a letter back--or this one’s returned to sender with “Fucker don’t ever write to me” on the envelope, well then, I guess I’ll have my answer.
> 
> Like I said, it’s been two weeks here, and I’ve barely had enough time or energy to piss, much less write or dick around or god forbid leave the barracks. Training started the minute I got off the bus; they issued us uniforms, checked out our medical, and got immunization shots. They cut my hair, Andy. I knew they were gonna, but I guess I just wasn’t prepared for the shock. Like fucking high school all over again: no tats, no piercings, not even my hair. I’m just a number here, one soldier out of millions. Makes me feel like school was just preparation for this, needle out any individuality so you’re nothing but a set of dog tags by the time you’re in basic.
> 
> Lesson to be learned here, Skib: don’t let them put you down in that school, don’t just be their number. Keep playing, keep writing; grow your hair long and tell them to fuck off if they don’t like it. Don’t let them take away what makes you, you.
> 
> They got us at a base here in Texas; it’s hot as fuck but it’s not bothering this native son one bit. Lots of others are bitching to high hell about the heavy uniforms we have to wear and all of the physical training we have to do in the bright sunlight, but they’re all soft, used to colder places, I’ll bet. Lots of the drill sergeants talk about this heat being nothing compared to the jungles in Vietnam, how the humid air wraps around you like a suffocating net, how even at night there’s no escape. They’re probably telling the truth, but I think most of them are full of shit: they’ve got their cushy jobs sending recruits off to war, they’ve never even been in Vietnam before.
> 
> We’re up from 5 AM to ten at night for training, and when I say training, I mean cleaning. That’s all the fuck we do all day: clean the barracks, clean the latrines, clean our own boots and clean the training weapons and whatever’s in storage. I don’t know if they plan on us going to war when they ship us over or to fuckin’ clean house. Maybe it gets different later on; I sure hope so, ‘cause I still haven’t gotten any lessons with my M-14, just learned how to disassemble, reassemble, and--you guessed it--clean the damn thing. So if the VC get me they’ll find a dumb corpse with a really shiny gun.
> 
> There’s other shit, too: mostly grunt work and physical training that makes climbing up my old treehouse look like using the damn stairs. A lot of it’s just to keep us in line, doesn’t even have to do with what we’ll face once we’re deployed. I don’t see the point in digging a foxhole except to keep me busy for a few hours, then get my uniform good and dirty so I have to--yep--clean it again. And everything’s got to be done as a unit: one guy fucks up, everyone else pays for it. Not my style at all, and you know it: I own up to my own faults, slap me on the wrist and call me a bad boy, but I really don’t like paying for someone else’s problems. Especially if it means having to do my job--which I did just fucking fine\--all over again.
> 
> Our unit’s made up of eight other guys including me; some’ll be deployed with me, some’ll be sent other places, additional training, whatever. It’s not that I don’t like them, they’re all fine, but I’m not making bosom buddies with most of them. But one of them, there’s this one guy here that just won’t let you live and let live, he’s got to be friends with everyone in the whole damn platoon. His name’s Dave--he introduces himself as David Cook, then says you can call him whatever the fuck you like, just don’t call him late for dinner, and I said fucking seriously, someone’s still using that old line unironically? But he just laughed, like that shit just rolls right off him: most of us play like we’ve got thick skin, we act tough, but Dave doesn’t have to act, he just is.
> 
> I read that back and that’s a really fucking bad description of someone, I’ll try to do better. Once again, wish I could scratch out on this paper, but don’t really have that luxury. Dave’s from Missouri, and I pegged him as one of those wusses bitching about the heat, but he was born in Houston so he knows what goes down here. He’s the first guy who came up to me in this place that didn’t shout in my face for me to shine my boots or get on the ground and do push-ups. (I’ve discovered I fucking hate push-ups.) He’s got this way of making basic feel like summer camp, like this whole thing is a farce or some fun competition on who can survive the longest. But he doesn’t mouth off to the squad leaders, he gets through it with his head ducked down just like I’m trying to handle. I wanted to do that with everything here, but Dave doesn’t let you, once he’s made you his friend you’ve got to talk to him and make him your friend, too, he doesn’t give you much of a choice.
> 
> He plays guitar, too: his father shipped it to him and somehow he managed to sweetalk his way into keeping it with him in the barracks. One of the first nights here I asked if I could play, just wanted to get my hands on the strings again, pray I didn’t get rusty in such a short time. It wasn’t like having my own there with me, but it felt like a little bit of home right there, a tiny sliver of normalcy when I played. His eyes were big as....well, big as yours after I was done, I think he wasn’t expecting to be so impressed. If he gets to keep it, and if I get to hang around with him a little longer, it might just be what I need to feel human here; like myself, and not just one of their programmed soldiers.
> 
> Dave also sings, but I told him flat-out that he’s not as good as you.
> 
> I think you two’d get along well together if you ever met. I was telling him a little about you--the guy’s nice and all, but he doesn’t ever shut up, and one day he was going on and on about his family and his brothers. We both had barracks duty so I couldn’t leave--more cleaning--so I started zoning out, and next thing I know he’s asking me about my family, and I don’t know, I just started blurting out the first thing that came to mind. You. Dave didn’t seem to care at all, he just shrugged and said friends definitely count as family, if they mean enough to you. He says you sound like a great guy, though he’s doubtful about the singing (I told him to shove it, and then he shoved me, and then there was more shouting from the squad leaders and more cleaning).
> 
> And, well, I don’t know why I just wrote out that whole story, it was kind of unnecessary. But--yeah, I mean...you do. Count as family. (Unless of course this letter comes back to me, which in that case, fuck you.) Hearing how Dave talked about his brothers, how this light shone in his eyes just thinking about them, missing them...not that you’re a brother or anything. Maybe a cousin. Oh, I don’t know what I’m fucking talking about...you’re my friend, Andy, and that means enough to me to count. Friend, family, fuck it--you just count.
> 
> Well, now I’ve spent all my time and all my paper writing this one letter--sorry, Mom, you won’t get your dose of appeasing generalities this week. Maybe if you could, tell her to send more cigarettes. I don’t always have a lot of free time around here, but I’ll always find some time for that.
> 
> And, you know...if you want to send me letters back, you can do that, too. I want to hear about what’s going on with you, and Nick and Travis and all them, and even the town, though I could really give two shits about Tulsa. I just want to know what’s going on back in the real world. It might make me miss it more, but you can at least remind me that you’re out there.
> 
> Don’t be a stranger.  
>  Neal

***

He hadn’t believed his mother when she called his name from the front door, claiming the mailman had a letter for him. Who do you even _know_ that’d send you mail, his sister snipped, as he bounded up the steps two at a time, careening down the hall and nearly barreling into his mother at the entryway.

But when he finally took the letter into his hands he held it as delicate as a captured butterfly, for fear that he might crush and kill it, or that it would flutter off and fly away.

There was one person he knew that would send him mail, Andy thought, his eyes wide as he closed the bedroom door behind him, and, without another thought, locked it. But he never thought Neal would ever send it.

It took Andy three days to answer the letter: three days until he could find the right words to put pen to paper, without fucking them up or rambling or going off on topics he didn’t think Neal would give a shit about. He’d never been the one with the words in their friendship: it was always Neal, Neal was the lyricist, he was the songwriter. Now he barely had any time to write simple letters home, and Andy had to find his own words.

He read it more times than he can count, soaking in every sentence, every blot of ink on the paper, and each time he folded it back carefully into the sheet’s original creases, and slipped it back into its envelope, its home. He carried it with him everywhere, stuffed in his pocket or between the sheets of a book, because if he left it out of his sight someone might haphazardly toss it, or return it to sender, and it’d be like losing an entire year of friendship, like losing Neal himself.

Andy knew somewhere in the back of his mind it wasn’t that important, it was just a letter; but something else inside him told him no, it was not.

The first time he tried to write was in his room, immediately after he read Neal’s letter, saw the unspoken remorse that if he didn’t get a letter back, he’d know he misjudged their friendship. Andy scrambled to find a clean sheet of notepaper and a pen in the mess of his room, threw off the books atop his desk, but his mind came to a blank when finally faced with the empty white of the lined page. All he could think about writing in his mind was I’m here, I’m here, over and over again, so Neal would never forget.

The second time was during study hall, fucking bored out of his mind. There was math homework to do but he’d always fucking hated math, and recently he’d been questioning the necessity for any of his studies if all twelve years of a private school education was getting him was a non-stop ticket to Saigon. He started off the letter fine, responding to each of Neal’s concerns without even having to look at the letter, already knowing it by heart. But his thoughts started to drift off both in his mind and on the page; he talked about school, and what Mr. Elton’s been having the literature class read and the crazy shit Mr. Lyons was making them do in gym class and how Ms. Parsons the librarian was still _so fucking old_ , and he realized right before the bell rang that Neal wouldn’t care about any of it. It was all some pointless information about a place he hated when he was there; that wasn’t what Andy wanted to remind him of while in basic training. On his way out the door he wadded the letter up into a ball and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

He was almost ready to give up, throw in the goddamned towel on letter writing because apparently when it came to finding the right words for Neal Andy became illiterate. He tried to come up with things to write, _something_ to write that Neal would care about, so it wouldn’t be a letter wasted; of all things, he didn’t want anything involved with Neal’s friendship to be a waste.

It was on his third day of the most frustrating writer’s block he’d had in his young life, sitting cross-legged on his bed, dual guitar cases laid out before him, that Andy found his inspiration. He set to work on the maintenance care he promised Neal he would undertake on his guitar while he was gone, his best friend’s most prized possession becoming his most prized charge; he wanted it to be perfect when Neal came home, as warm and pliant as the day he left, like he never missed a beat. But when he opened the case he noticed a flattened roll of paper stuffed into the lining of the case, sheet music poking out of its hiding place. Andy unrolled it, gingerly, muttering to himself that if Neal can’t keep his music organized he doesn’t get how he expects Andy to keep his shit together.

When he read the first few chords he recognized it immediately: penned in Neal’s signature chicken-scratch handwriting, he saw the framework of a first draft laid out onto the page, notes and chords filling the strict lines of music with sound. And then, as if overlaid atop Neal’s own writing, was his own hand, neater but more hesitant, reluctant to add or make the changes to his best friend’s masterful work. Andy remembered writing this one sweltering Sunday afternoon, tucked into a corner of his father’s garage with Neal, writing and perfecting until they lost the sunlight late into the evening. He read each note on the line and could hear Neal’s talented hands strumming the notes, his own voice resonating in their cement studio, singing out the words they had created together.

_Here is a song  
To ease your worried mind_

Andy’s eyes went wide with realization. He didn’t know if Neal stashed away the song in that case for Andy to find it or not; Andy thought with a smirk of amusement on his face that he wouldn’t put it past the fucker to do so. Neal always knew, somehow, when Andy needed a bit of a reminder, a magnum boost of self-confidence.

Setting the cases aside for the moment, he put down the polishing rag and picked up the pen, pulling a clean sheet of notepaper into his lap instead of a guitar. It weighed much less and wasn’t quite as bulky, but they felt similar in his hold somehow. He kept the sheet music open in front of him, marveling at how starkly their handwritings differed on the page, but came together to make something beautiful.

He had been trying, far too hard and with no luck, to write to Neal the soldier, the recruit off to his stint in basic training and then shipping straight to Saigon. That wasn’t the man whose words and notes were on this page, or who cherished the guitar Andy was eager to care for and eventually return. And that wasn’t the best friend he said goodbye to in the treehouse three weeks ago, whose lips he could still feel pressed against his own, a palm he could still remember warm on his cheek.

In all the time he had been trying to write the letter in return, trying to be something to Neal, to earn his correspondence, Andy hadn’t realized what the song made him see: it doesn’t have to be something, it already is.

Andy put the pen to paper and didn’t stop writing until his hand cramped in protest, his pen running out of ink, and his mother firmly informing him through his closed bedroom door that she was _disappointed_ he had chosen not to eat dinner with the family.

***

> March 19, 1968
> 
> You’re an idiot, you know that.

Neal couldn’t help but grin at the opening to Andy’s letter, the deep, deadpan voice sounding in his head from memory, with a hint of amusement mixed in with the reprimand. It instantly brought back memories of Tulsa, of their carefree moments when all that mattered was a beer in the hand and a record on the turntable. His eyes pored over the words, Andy’s handwriting impeccable as always, though a bit rushed with inspiration; Neal felt the same way, wishing he could shove away his dinner and grab pen and paper during mess instead.

The only distraction he found could detract him from the content of the letter was a lima bean, aimed and launched directly at his forehead, that bounced off the skin and slid onto the letter in his hands. Neal scowled at the line of grease the bean left in its wake, smudging the paragraph Andy had written about Tulsa. In every way, the army was ruining Neal’s connection to home.

When his eyes reluctantly lifted from the page he saw one of his fellow recruits grinning at him and pointing a finger at the letter. “Must be an awful nice letter,” the soldier said; he was in Neal’s training unit, Neal could connect a name to the face but at that moment he wished he never recognized him. If he was one of the men Neal was supposed to want to fight and die among, he seriously questioned the nature of military camaraderie.

“Go to hell, Yeager,” he muttered, wishing he could use more choice language but “hell” was the harshest Uncle Sam permitted without landing kitchen duty--again. The insult expectedly fell flat; Yeager mocked over-exaggerated offense while another soldier at the mess table spoke up.

“You look giddier than a schoolboy down there,” called a tall recruit from across the table; his observation was innocuous enough, but still Neal grimaced, wishing the short time he had to read his letters--let alone write them--could be left undisturbed. The soldiers were encouraged to fraternize within their units, but he was suddenly feeling like he was in high school all over again. “And no one gets a smile like that on their face ‘cause of a letter from their momma.”

“Who’s the lady?” Yeager asked, the smile going dirty. He reached for another lima bean on his plate and if he launched it at Neal again, so God help him, he was going to see how that M16 operates long before they ever land in Vietnam. “Any pictures? Stories? Regale us, Tiemann--”

Neal arched a perplexed brow. What the hell made them think that’s who the letter was from? “You’re crazy. You too, Menard,” he said as he carefully folded the letter back into its original creases--it was obvious he wasn’t going to be given the time to read it now. “It’s not from any girl; it’s from my best friend.”

The lima bean catapult was halted mid-launch, and this time it was Menard’s brow’s turn to crease in confusion. Maybe they should have spent more time worrying about their own damn affairs, Neal thought to himself, but before he could lose his inhibitions and tell that to their faces, a figure swooped in among them, arm draping around Neal’s shoulders, his voice far too joyful for being inside the recruits’ barracks.

“Now now, gentlemen,” David said, his bravado only outmatched by his confidence. Unlike Neal he befriended every man in their unit, though he admitted once with a playful smile that Neal may have been his favorite. Neal was still unsure as to how he managed to gain that distinction. “We can’t all have beautiful girlfriends and wives to send us precious words of endearment from the home front. Us young bachelors have to get our little victories wherever we can get them--from any letter that wasn’t written by our mothers.”

Neal rolled his eyes. “You love your mother’s letters,” he called out David’s bluff.

Without missing a beat David responded, conceding Neal’s point. “That I do,” he held his hand to his chest, his level of sincerity polished, he had once admitted, at the drama club in high school. “But that is because I am a good son and I mind my mother very much.”

“Mama’s boy.”

“Thank you.”

David pointed to Yeager, who, despite himself, was enjoying the quick banter between the other soldiers. “You keep asking for photos of other soldiers’ girls, Jason,” he playfully warned, the finger now waggling in the recruit’s direction. “And I’ll have no other choice but to tell your wife she better amp up the spiciness of her own pictures. And don’t say she doesn’t send you any! I’ve seen you after lights out shuffling through a whole stack!”

The grin on David’s face was relentless, and struck Yeager into a deep red blush. “Aw, Dave,” he protested, eyes rolling, his questions to Neal quickly disbanded.

“And you, Luke--” David turned his attentions to the other soldier down the table, who seemed a little startled to be singled out in the conversation. For two seconds David held a stern glare, but even his experience on the stage, both theatrical and musical, only allowed him to hold out for so long. “I’d especially love to get a letter from your wife; do me a favor, slip my number to her sometime!”

Any other man would have been replacing his dinner with the taste of blood and smashed-in teeth after that kind of comment--especially Neal, he thought to himself, because Neal always seems to have that kind of luck--but David only received a good-natured chuckle in return. “You’re never getting _near_ my Lara, Cook,” Luke said, rising from the table along with Yeager to bring their finished plates to the kitchen.

Free of the threat of another lima bean assault, Neal let down his guard. There were no other soldiers in his immediate vicinity save for the one draped around his shoulders, and the ones around them paid the two teenaged recruits no mind. Now, perhaps, Neal would get to respond to his letter in peace.

The relative peace, that is, of sitting next to David Cook. “You’re not going to say thank you?” he joked, snatching a cooling string bean from Neal’s neglected plate.

Neal rolled his eyes as he unfolded the letter again carefully, making sure that, apart from the smudged ink from the lima bean attack, Andy’s words were unblemished. “Thank you, Dave,” he droned. “Your tendency to be an ass has finally paid off in my favor.”

David threw up a choice finger in his defense, accompanied by the string bean. “You looked like you wanted privacy, or, at least what poses for privacy in this place.” Neal had only gotten to glance back down at the letter--Andy was yelling at him through the page for ever thinking he wouldn’t want to receive letters from Neal, that he was an idiot for even considering it--before giving a quizzical look in David’s direction.

With a mouthful of vegetable David answered the unspoken question. “I’m not all mouth, you know.” Neal restrained himself from making the obvious comment and poked at a gray slice of turkey on his plate instead. “I notice things. I noticed Jason hoards his stack of dirty pictures of his wife so no one knows he has them; I’ve noticed Luke loves his wife more than Uncle Sam.” David pointed at the letter, making the obvious and careful precaution of not reading its contents; that would defeat the entire purpose. “And I sure as hell noticed you wanted to keep that letter to yourself.”

Neal looked back down at the letter, wondering how David could have seen the excitement bubbling in his blood, the happiness in his face when Neal hadn’t even seen it himself. He had hoped Andy would send a response, as any man wished a letter to return. But now that it was in his hands, Andy’s unmistakable handwriting describing his own personal struggle to find the right words to write back to Neal, he cared more about these sheets of paper than he ever thought possible.

“Thank you,” he repeated to David, and this time, he truly meant it.

As payment, David claimed the rest of Neal’s string beans, quietly munching and observing while Neal read through the letter, more engrossed in Andy’s words than a novel. The news was insignificant, the stories of Tulsa all the same, their group of friends appearing to move along with their lives seamlessly without Neal’s presence, as they had with all the others who left for war before him. All but for Andy, who was muddling through his school year, head down, eyes to the ground, just looking to make it through. He said the town felt like a suspense film to him, something Hitchcock would have dreamed up, every soul going about their normal business while Andy knew something integral was missing in the equation. Like picking up a guitar and trying to play without the strings, he said. Your hands go through the motions but the real music’s nowhere to be found.

The smile slowly spreading on Neal’s face was an unmistakable grin by the time he reached the end of the letter, where Andy threatened bodily harm, if Neal hasn’t endured it already, if the flow of letters from his friend ever stopped. He had to stop himself from letting his fingers ghost over the last lines, how Andy told Neal it was okay to mention him to David as if he were family, but he hoped Neal didn’t mind that Andy wasn’t thinking of him like a brother.

After waiting an appropriate amount of time for Neal’s own privacy, David called in the other favor as payment for his distraction services: he, in his own way, demanded to get to know Neal Tiemann better. “How’s it going back home?” he asked with a little smile, already knowing from the look on Neal’s face the answer had to be positive.

Neal’s fingers were already itching to write back to Andy, ensure that he made good on his friend’s agreement to be his sounding board, the one he could vent to when Neal needed; the target of Neal’s release. But the mess bell rang, signifying the end to dinner, and Neal had to leave his letter-writing prospects at the table with the remainder of his dinner. Shooting a grin at David as they exited the hall, Neal carefully stuffed the letter into his shirtpocket, patting it for safekeeping. “Nothing’s changed,” he said, as they reported to the barracks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics in this chapter come from the MWK song [Fairweather Friend](http://bit.ly/12L1axs)\--specifically, the 2003 version found on their eponymous album (and not the 2008 version from Andy's [To Have Heroes](http://bit.ly/12L1WL3) EP. Yes, there's a difference. ;-)


	3. Chapter 3

> March 31, 1968
> 
> Call me an idiot one more time, Skib; we’ll see if I keep sending letters to someone so hostile to me. I get enough abuse from the drill sergeants here, endless days of push-ups, group marches, weapons training, bitch, bitch, bitch...I finally get to settle down and rest with news from home, and I’m greeted by you threatening to hack me to bits if I don’t write back. You’ve got me more scared than the VietCong, Andy. More violence outta you and I’ll be sending my letters elsewhere. I wonder if your sister would like to start getting some mail.

“You send your letters to my sister and I’ll really kill you,” Andy mumbled to himself, an amused smile on his lips as he read his latest letter from Neal.

The postal service was a tricky racket to master, Andy had discovered, when he noticed the disparity in dates between when Neal wrote the letter and when it had actually arrived on his doorstep. And these letters were only coming from an army base in Texas; Andy frowned deeply when he thought of the wait he’d have to endure for letters from another country.

He had other things on his mind, of course, and tasks that were far more important than sitting at the base of his mailbox like Charlie Brown, futilely waiting for his valentine. School was Andy’s largest burr in his side, the dull, droning hours passing by without consequence, the lustre of the building lost to Andy once Neal had graduated. And he had his music, taking up his guitar every day, making sure he could at least keep up to where Neal had left off--he wasn’t foolish enough to ever think he could reach the level of raw talent in his friend, but he could try his best to match rhythm to Neal’s lead, forge a stringed harmony to make the songs complete.

But everything Andy did before the looming war came to their town, right to his door, felt inconsequential; overshadowed by the more pressing matters happening in army bases, in jungles halfway around the world. What use was his trigonometry homework, when more and more of his schoolmates were leaving on those sad buses out of Tulsa, draft cards in hand, and never coming back? How could they expect him to attend a pep rally--not that Andy would have anyway, the football team was a bunch of assholes, and he’d rather eat metal than cheer them on--when his best friend was telling him how he learned to handle a fucking grenade launcher last week?

Even music, that passion in his life, the notes that fit like marrow in his bones and spouted reality from his lips--even that was fading. The albums spinning on his turntable-- _Strange Days_ , and _Sgt. Pepper_ , and even _Bookends_ , that Neal insulted mercilessly because Garfunkel sounded like such a fairy--were never louder than the evening news, who reported nightly the horrors every soldier faced abroad. His own music was some solace, bringing his guitar down to the garage to practice, or on the nights too cold and too exhausting to move from his bedroom, playing his acoustic on the bed, the feel of the strings against his fingers a small comfort. But each time he brought out his guitar to play, another stared at him from its case, begging to be played but not by Andy; its condition well cared-for but neglected in spirit.

It felt wrong for Neal’s guitar to be silent for so long; it felt wrong for Andy not to hear Neal play it for so long, as well.

As Andy read through the latest letter, hearing about the army lectures Neal had to endure on military regulations--leaving one classroom for another, he wrote, and equally as mind-numbing--Neal addressed the issue, more sternly than Andy would have expected, but in Neal’s classic style.

> And you better not just be cleaning my guitar; I know you’re taking care of it, I don’t even need to ask, but that doesn’t just mean tuning the strings and keeping it shiny. Fuck, I don’t want a shiny guitar, I want MY guitar when I get back. And if it feels like no one’s been playing it, if it’s just been sittin’ there, like a wallflower all done up with no one to ask her to dance...that won’t feel right, either. I know it’s a little strange of a request, but do this for me, please, even if you don’t think you’re talented enough, or worthy, or other bullshit excuses I know you’re good at making to yourself. A good guitar’s like your cock: it ain’t just there for decoration, it expects to be used. So use it!

It took three re-reads of the last sentence for Andy to convince himself it referred to Neal’s guitar, not Andy’s cock; though with his friend’s sense of humor, knowing Andy’s experience with the latter was only self-taught, he wouldn’t put it past him.

He gave a longing glance at the extra case in his bedroom, the guitar nestled inside begging to be used and Neal’s letter giving Andy the blessing. But still, he couldn’t bring himself to play, even when he pulled the guitar into his lap, sitting barefooted and cross-legged on his bed, long after everyone else in the house was asleep. The daunting task loomed too large in his head, every option springing to his fingertips falling short. He had been learning some Clapton songs on his own, even tackling some Townsend with Nick’s tutelage, but he couldn’t bring himself to play any of it on Neal’s guitar. Andy could play covers until his fingers bled on his own guitar; but with Neal’s, he felt it needed to be something his friend would have truly appreciated to hear, if he could. It needed to be something special.

Sighing defeatedly, Andy rested the guitar back into its home, and, his hand running down the front of his boxer shorts, started work on Neal’s other suggestion.

Two days later, another letter arrived in the mail for Andy, much faster than his most recent reply could have warranted. Neal must have sent it immediately after the first, Andy reasoned; hell, he hadn’t even sent his reply yet, the letter apologetically mentioning his hesitations to play Neal’s guitar. Whatever Neal had to tell him, he realized, it was something that just couldn’t wait.

When he unfolded the pages Andy noticed immediately there were no words to the page: a mess of hastily-drawn lines running parallel to each other on the page, marked with dark black blots of ink, told all the story Andy needed to know. It was a song Andy had never seen before, something they hadn’t even been working on when Neal had left; the quick, rushed strokes revealed Neal wrote it in a fit of creative passion, one of his bursts of inspiration Andy knew well. Some scratched out notes marked some doubt in the composition; the crowded nature of the improvised sheet music said to Andy that Neal didn’t know when this song would end, or if it even would. He just had to keep writing it.

At the very top of the page, slotted into one of the few blank spaces on the paper, Neal had written just one word, the only bit of language that didn’t speak to Andy in notes and chords, but letters, and deeper than that, in Neal’s emotions.

>   
> _Please._

Andy’s discerning eyes examined each note, played them over in his mind like a record player dancing along the grooves of an LP. He could hear the melodies in his head, the music haunting and dark, and reminding him very much of the songs Neal wrote before he had left. But there was something below the surface of notes that Andy couldn’t decipher just from looking at the page; something deep, a coded emotion of Neal’s that yearned not to merely be read, but _heard_.

He looked across the room, in the corner where two guitars filled the space as if they were one, and knew what he had to do.

Lifting it into his lap, his back pressed against the headboard, his large eyes cast down upon the honey-golden sheen of the wood and the crude sheet music he scattered around his feet. The guitar felt heavier to him in his arms this time, the weight making its presence known, like even the wood and strings themselves knew this moment was important. Everything surrounding Andy reminded him of Neal, from the handwritten music to the spaces on the neck of the guitar where Neal’s hands had lovingly worn off the lacquer; Andy fit his own hands there, the natural texture of the wood scraping against his palm, his fingers, and for the first time he felt it fit perfectly. And when he began to put sound to the notes, the marriage of music filling the room, he felt like Neal was right there with him, gaze over his shoulder following the notes, hands guiding Andy’s to where they needed to be.

***

> April 29, 1968
> 
> Alright, Neal. I get that you want me to keep you updated on the news in Tulsa, you want to hear all the shit going down, no matter how mundane. I know what you said, that you wanted to have at least some kind of connection to normalcy, to your old life. And I’ve been doing that--or, at least, I’ve been trying.
> 
> But fuck, man, do you realize how mind-numbingly boring this place is??
> 
> Of course you do. You don’t even need to answer that, you told that to me every time you took a breath in this town. You knew Tulsa’s just full of old men and woodrot and the faithless “American Dream” that was never your dream. I’ve kept it up these past few weeks, trying to figure out something to put in these letters, other than the songs we’ve been writing, or what the local news has been saying about shit you already know, or how I miss hearing you play and just being here. But I’m runnin’ out of ideas. Am I going to report on Nick’s 38,000th fart joke? Or the all-state standings of the school’s football team? (Oh, I should keep you posted on that. I know how much you cared about varsity sports. You’d die without knowing the results of the homecoming game.)
> 
> I keep trying to picture you reading these letters in basic training, and seeing all of the useless information you didn’t even care about when you were here, and thinking, well fuck, writing to Andy was a bad idea. And then you might stop altogether, and spend your time writing letters to someone a little more interesting than me. So please, just...don’t stop writing. Even when you’re out of the country, even if it’s just a song, or a stupid note telling me you’re still alive. Especially those. You want to know the real world’s waiting for you? I want to know you’re still around to come back to it.
> 
> (DO NOT send letters to Alexis, Neal. She’s transferring to New York soon for college, and I’m not giving you her address, but knowing you, you resourceful fucker, you’d find it out just to fuck with me. It would be...weird in ways I can’t even describe. So just don’t, okay?)
> 
> I do have one item of note you might want to know about, and you’re not gonna find it in any of the Tulsa papers, and you’re definitely not going to hear about it in any letter you get from your mother.
> 
> I got into a fight.
> 
> It’s kinda your fault.
> 
> One of the letters I had written you...it must have slipped out of my bag, or someone stole it, or _something_ , because I’m usually more careful than to just fucking leave them somewhere and forget about them. (Though I’ve been writing so many recently, added to all the songs we’ve been tossing back and forth, and I guess it’s possible I lost track.) Well, regardless, one of them resurfaced in history class. You remember history class, the one with Mr. Anderson, the one guy in the whole department who actually seems to care about shit from this century? (But look, here’s that useless detail bullshit about school you won’t care about. Fuck, I don’t care about it, and it’s my life.) And it resurfaced in the hands of someone I really didn’t want it to end up in. (The name doesn’t matter, I don’t think I even know it; they’re all interchangeable, anyway. Blond, popular, athletic...everything I’m not, and everything I’ve firmly realized I never want to be. But you know all that.)
> 
> He cracked some shit to me about writing to G.I.s like a lonely housewife; I denied it, and told him to go take a baseball bat to the jaw. Anderson tried to defuse it, but ‘course, that never stops anything. Five minutes later the ball of paper’s being chucked back at my head, and the jackass and his friends--because he recruited friends, they always have friends--start talking shit about the war, and how all you soldiers are scratching your asses over there and lining up to get killed. How America has no business sending us all to die for a bunch of gooks--their words, not mine--and any soldier who lets themselves get bossed around like that deserves to die.
> 
> I told them to shut their fucking mouths, that they didn’t know anything; I stood up, hands in fists, eyes seeing red. How can they even say those things about soldiers living and dying for this war?! Knowing their privileged asses, I bet they’ve secured exemptions long before they’ll even need them. They’ll never see one minute of combat, never pick up a gun or risk their lives for anything bigger than themselves; how dare they judge the ones who are man enough to own up to that responsibility.
> 
> You never let those kinds of guys get away with their self-righteous bullshit when you were here; I planned to take a page from your book and do the same.
> 
> What I was expecting was another round of neutral pleas from Anderson for all of us to calm down so he could get back to the Mongols or the Huns or whatever he was droning on about. I mean, that’s what most teachers’d do, right? But he stands up from his desk, stern look on his face, and agrees with the shitheads. Said the U.S. is acting like a bunch of schoolyard bullies in Vietnam--bullies! Maybe he should take a fucking look at who he’s siding with!--and it’s a shame he’s got to see so many of his students dying over there for nothing.
> 
> For nothing.
> 
> And he told me to sit down because I was the one being unreasonable. Someone told me later he said it again when I didn’t respond, but I heard nothing of it, the anger was just buzzing in my ears too loud to hear much of anything. Besides the laughing. Those guys were laughing, at the soldiers, at you, and I couldn’t take it any longer.
> 
> Someone said I cleared a whole desk on my way; I never took hurdles before so I think they’re full of it. But man, that satisfying _crunch_ on my knuckles as I knocked that laugh clear off his face? Worth it.
> 
> Don’t worry, my hand’s fine; I can still play, I think. My face, after getting in that one good punch and then realizing I was up against four varsity players, didn’t fare as well. 
> 
> So, long story short--I guess this is the short version--I landed detention after school with Anderson while those fuckers laughed all the way to baseball practice. Mostly I just sat there, fuming, refusing to even  look at him and contemplating ways to transfer out of the class. But then, he started talking; and not talking at me like I expect from teachers, but straight to me, and I had to listen. 
> 
> He understood that I had friends over there, or ready to get shipped over; he did, too, students and friends alike. So he knew why I would lash out at someone talking shit about the soldiers and wanting to stand up for them--you. But he also made me look at the bigger picture of the war, that standing up for it doesn’t just mean standing up for you, it’s supporting the war itself, and what the U.S. is doing over there. 
> 
> I haven’t really taken a look at it like that before, I mean, a war’s a war, we get into it to protect our country and ourselves, right? At least, that’s what I thought, but taking a look at what Anderson told me--us stepping into another country’s problems without having enough cause of a threat, fighting a war we’re not prepared for--I’m wondering if that’s right all along. 
> 
> Oh, look at me, I’m sounding like one of those peacenik hippies from the university. Don’t mind me. Don’t think I’m going soft or anything, Neal. I know you’re getting your ass kicked in basic training and you’re giving up...hell, you’re giving up a lot to be over there. I’m completely clear on the “how” of this all, but I’m not so sure on the “why,” anymore. 
> 
> I really don’t give a shit about the war, or why Johnson dragged us into it, or what’ll happen if the Communists take over Vietnam. I just want my best friend back. 
> 
> Preferably, you know, in one piece. Aim for that. 
> 
> Don’t get killed, dingus.  
>  Andy P. Skib 
> 
> P.S. I took a picture of the battle scars I earned from my fight with the jocks in Anderson’s class; had to document my first fistfight without you here to back me up, didn’t I? I bugged Alexis over it, and she developed it for me in her darkroom. Here’s the copy I got her to make for you. I am quite the looker. Breaking hearts everywhere with this face. 
> 
>   
> 

***

The photograph fluttered to the ground when he opened the letter, Andy’s proudly bruised face tucked into the papers. A broad, indulgent smile greeted him from the page, the skin around Andy’s right eyes darkened into a shiner but the vitality in his eyes was as bright as ever, wearing his wounds like a badge of honor.

Much like his sister, Andy had been enamored with photography ever since getting his first camera, and it became his unspoken mission to document all the events in his life, no matter how inconsequential they may have seemed at the time. It was the only reason Neal had any recollection of some nights, a shadowy flash of color and light in one of Andy’s photos reminding him of drunken, half-asleep escapades, or footage to be used as future blackmail. It came as no surprise to Neal that Andy would want to document this moment, but his breath caught in his throat, mouth going dry, over the fact that Andy wanted to share this moment with him.

It was unfortunate Neal didn’t have the time to share it.

The barracks were abuzz with activity in the late afternoon, the last remnants of the Texas sun streaming in through the windows--spotless, thanks to Neal and his unit and their expert grasp of their training in cleanliness. Somehow, Neal thought, he didn’t believe that experience would be the most beneficial to them where they were going...

But he shut his eyes tightly, blocking out the sunlight. He didn’t want to think about it, for however many seconds he had the luxury not to.

They told the recruits it was done usually at night, so they could all sleep during transport, get to their destination bright and early in the morning, bushy-tailed and ready for action. The soldiers with experience, the ones who knew better, figured it was so there wasn’t any time to tell loved ones of their departure. So the men couldn’t get cold feet. So you’d only meet darkness if you decided to run.

He took a glance to his left, then right, watching the other recruits pack up their own belongings to be sent home, or brought with them to worlds that will never feel like home. Yeager set the stack of photographs of his wife into a mailing box, keeping only one with him; Neal could tell it was killing him not to have the time to examine each one, feel the joy of each photograph in his hands, and having to choose only one to remain. Luke reached into the collar of his shirt, beyond the dark green canvas and underneath his faded undershirt, to pull out the small silver cross dangling around his neck. When he thought no one was watching, he brought it to his lips and kissed it; a silent prayer that Neal would never know its contents, but, seeing the conviction on Luke’s face after he mouthed the words “Amen,” he had a bit of an inkling.

It was almost too painful to turn his gaze on David, who was busy sealing his guitar case up with packing tape, an address in Kansas City written on the front in permanent marker. From the stricken look on David’s face, any other man would think he was entombing a loved one, a member of his family. Neal was the only one in those barracks who understood that he was: the guitar, too bulky and large to travel with them, had to be sent home, and for David it was like losing his left arm. Neal would readily admit he felt the pain, too, of knowing he’d no longer have that outlet for his music, the temporary salve of a borrowed guitar with which to play, to write. When David was close to tears as the base’s mail services hauled away the case for shipping, Neal draped a sympathetic arm around his shoulders, the comforts of home slowly pulling away on a light truck, and vanishing from view.

And just as quickly, another vehicle came over the horizon: painted in brown and green splotches, it was larger than the mail truck, its flatbed outfitted with a canvas netting stretched over the back like a covered wagon. A lump formed in Neal’s throat at its approach: it was no damn covered wagon, that was for certain.

He had kept the rest of his letters from Tulsa in his personal pack, part of the few items soldiers were allowed to bring with them on their perilous journey. Lightweight, easy to carry and hide, they were the first item on Neal’s short list, ensuring he could take at least a semblance of home with him wherever he went. And if he could take this small piece of Andy with him--Andy’s handwriting, his words, the music they were creating together--well, then Vietnam might not be so foreign, after all.

With the dwindling free minutes Neal had left, he erased all evidence he ever lived in that barracks, ever trained for the war he was heading towards, unprepared, afraid; lonely. He picked up the photograph that had fallen to his feet, none worse for the wear: Andy’s face smiled back at him, battered but undaunted, a friendly optimism that couldn’t be extinguished. The small smile crept back onto Neal’s face as he tucked the photo in his shirt pocket, close to his chest, for safe-keeping. He’d bring this piece of Andy with him, as well, to whatever journey lay ahead.


	4. Chapter 4

> June 14, 1968
> 
> Sorry this is getting to you so late, Andy. I’ve been kinda busy, not much time to write a letter; don’t have much time to write this one, even. You know, preoccupied with getting shipped to this fucking hellholle they call Vietnam. Getting shot at.
> 
> Hope you forgive me.
> 
> Sorry...I read that back and I sound like a huge dick. I don’t want to be, really; you let me use you to vent but not as a punching bag. (And from the looks of that photo you sent me, you were someone else’s punching bag lately. Ouch.) But I suppose I’ve been in a foul mood ever since they sent us over here, and it’s fucking understandable if you ever set foot in this country. They flew us off without much warning, just pack up your shit, send home what you can’t carry, no time to even call my mom for a last goodbye. The flight felt like forever, holed up in a freezing military bay, no windows to even see the Pacific ocean under our feet. I slept some; guess I had to, with the amount of time we had on that plane. Can’t remember it, though; I haven’t slept since we landed. It’s not insomnia, ‘cause that would imply that I want to sleep, and I feel if I close my eyes just for a second here, I’d drop my guard, and something could happen.
> 
> David hasn’t slept much, either, but that’s all the better for the unit: I’m pretty sure his snoring would give away our locations from miles away.
> 
> The first thing you notice when you get here: it’s hot. Not like, summers in Tulsa, walking out to gym class on the athletic field feels like you opened the door to an oven, kind of hot: this is something on an entirely different level. The air’s thick as soup and just as steamy, and the nights don’t give any relief at all, just takes away the added torture of having the sun beat down on you through the jungle trees. There’s never a cool breeze, and you end up sweating through your fatigues in the morning when you’ve barely had them on. The sweat’s been getting in my eyes, so I’ve taken to keeping a rag or a kerchief with me when I’m walking around the base, sometimes around my neck, but usually tucked into my back pocket. Dave’s been joking that I’m starting a new fashion trend around the base, but Dave’s been making bad jokes about a lot of shit lately. I think he’s just using it to try to keep sane. I’m just here trying to keep cool.
> 
> When we first arrived, we were lucky, we were told, to get stationed at a military base of operations and not immediately out in the field. Lots of grunts, or enlisted men, never really get a home base, they’re sent out as the scouts, the cannon fodder to rustle out the small packs of VietCong. Right from the plane to the fields, and most of them don’t ever make it to a base. But I’m some kind of lucky shit, since I signed up right after dropping out of college, knowing they were gonna fuck me over either way: we get stationed first at the base, then sent on reconnaissance patrols of the area. Mostly our main objective is fumbling through the jungles, making sure all the VC we shot dead a few days ago stay dead. Trust me, it’s easier said than done.
> 
> But most of the time we’re hanging around base, getting more drills and classes shoved into our heads, learning more about the maintenance trades like artillery and light aircraft repair, and bringing in any units that come to us after their patrols, or any grunts lucky enough to survive and make it here. They’re trying to teach us some of the Asian culture here, why the people are doing what they’re doing; why so many of the villagers see the marauding guerrillas as heroes and not the enemy. And I stress that they’re trying to teach me a few Vietnamese phrases and words, but I’ve got no head for foreign languages. You’d do alright here though, Andy: lots of the South Vietnam higher-ups speak fluent French. You could get to practice your frog-speak.
> 
> The craziest thing? We set ourselves down on Vietnamese soil, barely enough time to breathe, and we find out our commanding officer in the field, the one we were assigned once we got onto the plane, was killed in combat just that morning. Our fucking luck! I thought for a second that meant we were shit outta luck, we were on our own in the jungles, we’d be VC bait for sure. But turns out they already had a new commander ready for us, someone who’d been out there for a while, rose his way through the ranks by guts and spit. You wouldn’t even believe it if I told you.
> 
> It was Bryan! That fucking Jewett, thought he’d be worm food by now. But apparently he’d done alright since he’d been in country, made quite a name for himself at base for staying cool in battles where the toughest generals would’ve shit themselves clear through their fatigues. It’s why we never heard from him back home, I guess; too busy kicking ass and taking names. Everyone considers him a hero around these parts, look up to him like some fearless soldier; even Dave, whom I’ve never seen so starstruck, except for that first time he watched me play his guitar. Us Tulsa boys, we’re wowing him left and right.
> 
> But Bryan told me later, in confidence, that it’s not just about runnin’ out there, guns blazing, bustin’ heads. This war’s not what we’ve seen in the movies, there ain’t no Dirty Dozen set of misfit heroes you want to root for, that you know will come out the victors against those nasty Nazis, or Commies, or whoever’s the villain this time around. We’re all the misfits here, from the greenest grunt to the most decorated war hero. No one’s rooting for themselves to win, they just want to get the hell out of here. And as for the villains--Bryan’s eyes got dark on this one, real dark, and it felt like he was looking through me to something he could only see in his memory--he said there comes a point, when you’ve survived long enough, that you don’t even know who the villains are anymore.
> 
> Don’t tell anyone I said this, Bryan’ll kill me if he finds out I said anything to you. Not to Nick, or Travis...don’t even say anything when Bryan comes back. But if I were ever gonna tell a soul about this, it’d be you.
> 
> Which had brought ol’ Bryan and me to a new problem: he’s my commanding officer, I’ve got to show him the utmost respect and obey every order he gives without fail, treat him like a superior. But...I’ve seen the guy in his underwear when he was so fucking drunk he thought his clothes were too binding and he needed to be free. (Actually, I think you have photographic evidence of that night, somewhere. You always do.) I’ve convinced him to take up surfing on the hood of Nick’s car; I’ve bet him he couldn’t eat his age in pounds of corned beef. (Best twenty dollars I ever spent.) He’s not a commander to me, he’s not an authority figure, he’s just Bryan Jewett.
> 
> He had brought me aside afterwards, knowing that this could be a problem, for the both of us. What we learn in basic training, he said, is nothing like what you experience out in the field, in the heat of battle. They teach us all of this regimental shit, extremely fucking complicated rank titles; basically, explaining how everyone in the army is of a higher rank than you, exactly how higher on the totem pole they are, and detailing why everyone can treat you like shit. But Bryan explained that, while some of that holds weight on the base, in the field none of that shit matters. A VC’s bullet don’t care; it can kill a general just as easy as a grunt, so long as it kills. In real combat all that protocol they drilled into our heads doesn’t count for shit; the only thing that matters is getting you and your friends out alive.
> 
> He also said that was fucking easier said than done. Then he stopped talking about it altogether.
> 
> That’s the rule of thumb around here, mostly: you don’t talk about the bad. There’s terrible shit going down all the time outside of this base, death and destruction, some fucking horrible losses in battle--on both sides. And most guys around here, when they’re not in the thick of it, they want to keep their distance, maybe keep a little bit of their sanity while they’re at it.
> 
> It amazed me the first time we got to base and they informed us our commanding officer had been blown to bits by a land mine, so thoroughly fucked they couldn’t find a decent enough piece of him to pack up and ship home in a box. No one was mourning, or telling us this in anything less than an emotionless drone. There’s no room here for remorse because everyone’s in the same goddamn boat: it could have been any one of those soldiers, or any of us, who had the shit luck to step on that mine. People you’ve been with weeks, maybe even months...you’ve got no time to grieve, to care, if they die right in front of you. It makes me wonder if anyone would even bat an eye if I died out here.
> 
> Wow, that was fucking depressing. Like I said, no one talks about shit like that around here, so I guess I just needed some place to put it down into words. And it’s in your letter, because, well...it’s you. I can tell you anything, Andy, and I know you’d understand.
> 
> That really fucking sucks about what happened in Anderson’s class; I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help even out the odds a little, crack open some fuckin’ varsity skulls. Always a good time. And as for the rest, well, I hope you’ve been beat but not beaten; I don’t want to hear you’ve been rethinking your beliefs just because you got them beat out of you. You think what you’ve got to, Skib, and that’s what matters, if it’s for or against this war. (Just as long as you keep sticking your neck out to support me, that is.)
> 
> And I’ll try for that getting home in one piece deal. It’s better than getting blown to bits and only finding an ear to send home to Mom.
> 
> (Can you imagine? All my tats, just...poof. Jungle fertilizer. I’m telling Dave to save my skin if I die, literally: can’t let good artwork like this go to waste.)
> 
> I like how you reworked the bridge between the first verse and chorus in that last song I sent you; I didn’t know if it would take, it was only me listening to my own wandering fingers late at night at basic, not even Dave was awake to give me critique. I just sorta...wrote what came to mind, and I had to know what you thought. Thanks for not letting me down.
> 
> I’m enclosing a few other songs I tried to work out before we got shipped over, especially since Dave had to send his guitar back home and we’ve got nothing of the sort around here. Some of them you’ll remember well and good enough; we had a rough draft of a few of these, but I had thought of some tweaking and I wanted to run it by you. There are some lyrics, too; “Godspeed” came out the first night we were here, not sleeping, just listening to the eerie silence around, knowing any sound I heard in the distance was gunfire. It’s, well...it ain’t regular teenage angst anymore, Andy, that’s for sure. I can’t wait to hear how it sounds when you sing it.
> 
> I don’t know how often I’ll be able to write out here; I’ve, surprisingly, got more free time when I’m in base, but I don’t know how often I’ll be staying within the safe confines of the camp here. (And doesn’t it fucking figure, they don’t give a shit here if you clean around here. Just so long as you keep your M-14 in working order and don’t shit on the floor. I think I can handle that.) But when I can I’ll be sending letters to you, you know it. And regardless of whether I can get them to you or not, I hope you’ll keep sending them on to me, I mean it. I don’t care if Ho Chi Minh himself tries to steal my mail and piss on it, I’ll get those letters dammit, and I’ll read them. (Well, maybe not if he pisses on them. Hope you understand.)
> 
> -Neal

***

The papers in his hands shouldn’t have existed.

Andy shouldn’t have felt the dusty, slightly oily paper between his fingers, so different from the mass-produced sheets found in the states. He shouldn’t have been able to smell the moist jungle when he opened the envelope, or seen the smudges of mud at each corner of the page--Vietnam soil mixed with ink--placed there by an unmistakable press of a thumb. This letter shouldn’t have come from Vietnam; Neal shouldn’t have been half a world away, risking his life in a warzone. He should have been there in Tulsa, with Andy, writing songs, drinking beers, and just fucking _being nineteen_.

Those papers shouldn’t have existed but at the same time Andy prayed he’d never stop getting them.

He had opened the letter the night before, long awaiting Neal’s latest letter from basic training, only to find a very different kind of letter was waiting for him in that envelope. There were flares of optimism in those pages, news about Bryan and Neal’s good fortune securing a base camp that should have kept Andy’s spirits high; but all he could feel was the dirt on the paper, the otherworldliness in which Neal’s words were encased. It took him two minutes, sitting frozen on his bed, just to breathe again; it took an entire night of not sleeping for the lump of fear in his throat to subside. At least Neal wasn’t the only one with insomnia from this.

The next morning left him in a daze, the gray, overcast skies reflecting his somber mood. Andy didn’t speak a word to anyone the entire day, trudging through school with his head down and lips sealed, worried if someone asked what was wrong, or a teacher called on him during class, he’d let the wrong kind of words fly out--or even worse, a fist. He hoped every soul in the building would overlook his sunken, sleepless eyes, the stare he perfected to make it look like he was concentrating on geometry when his thoughts were a world away, on a friend that trusted Andy would always understand him.

It took all the willpower Andy had not to write a letter each period, every emotion in his body thrown down and scratched onto the page. He wanted to rage at Neal for not telling him about deployment sooner, that the first time he heard he’s going to fucking Vietnam is when he’s already in the thick of it. He wanted to decry his resentment for the government, the war itself--the whole fucking world--for making this an inevitability, for his best friend learning how to kill with a gun and never mourn the men they leave behind. Most of all he wanted to assure Neal that Andy would care if Neal died, if no one in Vietnam would. That even the thought of Neal’s flippancy over being blown to bits, of never coming home again, made Andy shudder with dread.

But each time he stopped himself, knowing no good would come from a letter written in anger, fueled by fear. The disregard Neal reflected in his letter--only a few weeks in country and he’s already numb, Andy thought, and how the hell would he survive a year more of this--was troubling. But Andy knew more than anyone that he couldn’t force Neal to feel something; it had to come naturally or else he would resist. Andy and the drill sergeants in Texas knew, yelling at Neal only made him stubbornly ready to do the exact opposite.

With the pen poised in his hand above the first line of ruled paper in his notebook, Andy fought the urge to start the letter in his last period of the class. Instead he wrote, in the last seconds before the final bell rang, the thoughts that mattered most from Neal’s letter--above the fear, above the cold resentment, but what he felt deeper in his core that was mirrored in the other pages Neal had sent to him.

_If I have to die, let it be for you._

Andy’s mind was consumed with worry as he started on his long walk home, the distance no longer a burden to him when he had no other option. The typical noise and clamor of the streets were drowned out by the dull buzz in his head, and the phantom sound of rifle fire and men screaming--sounds he had never heard in his life outside of a movie theater, but he suspected were becoming all too common to others.

Head bowed down, eyes to the ground, Andy hadn’t heard the shouts of warning or the signs of alarm until it was upon him, and it was too late.

A flash of heat and bright, flickering light passed by him, startling Andy into attention. When the heat grew nearer his survival instincts kicked in, jumping backwards from the threat, back curved, hands frantically swatting above his head. The fire in question fell quickly and harmlessly from his head to the concrete ground, leaving Andy with little more than some singed hair and a sunburn on the back of his neck. If anything was to jolt him out of a depressing mood, he supposed, nearly getting set on fire would do it.

He looked down at the offending piece of material, still smoldering, but no longer in flames; whatever fuel had been used to light the fire had burned hot and quick. It was a soot-blackened piece of fabric, as far as Andy could tell in that condition, long and narrow, with two rings protruding from the garment, like straps. He’d seen a similar shape before, he just couldn’t put his finger on it...

Andy’s eyes widened as he realized what exactly had fallen at his feet, and what exactly he had stumbled into.

The scene before him became clearer as he looked up, opened his ears to the sound of chanting protests and female voices shouting through a megaphone; opened his eyes to the sight of more burning undergarments than he had ever expected to see in his life. All around him women stood triumphant, brandishing the bras in their hands like weapons, as fierce as soldiers on their way to battle. But they paid little notice to Andy; with a sigh of relief he stepped to the side, attempting as smoothly as possible to extract himself from the protest and get the everliving fuck out of there.

But good fortune wasn’t cooperating: out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the female protesters heading towards him, and he knew he had been spotted. She looked younger than the other women in the group, but only barely, a pale complexion and long, auburn-colored hair swept into a ponytail giving the impression she looked younger than she actually was. Andy braced for the derision, fearing that the women’s rights movement might have been even _more_ brutal than Neal’s war stories, when he noticed the girl rushing towards him was not driven or angry, but instead had a distressed, and even apologetic, expression on her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics in this chapter are from "[Godspeed](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mwk2)," off of MWK's 2003 eponymous album.


	5. Chapter 5

> June 30, 1968
> 
> So I’ve met this girl.
> 
> Now before I go any further, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea or anything. I haven’t “met a girl,” if you know what I mean. And you do, because you “met” that one girl, in college, who you insisted on gloating about “meeting” immediately afterwards, like you wanted to send out a press release or something. So, you know, I...still haven’t “met” anyone, I’m kinda waiting that one out. But I did meet this girl.
> 
> She threw a flaming bra on my head.
> 
> Yeah, that’s a really bad way to start this story. But most of it isn’t all that interesting, anyway; the flaming bra part is what I know would catch your attention. (Fire, women’s undergarments...just add beer into the mix and you’d be up for anything.) But, long story short, it was the day I got your letter, and I was feeling kind of down about it, I’ll admit it. I didn’t think that point where you’d actually be going into Vietnam would come about so soon, and so abruptly; it shocked me, and to be a little honest with you, it scared me. Reality never hurts so much as when it sucker punches you in the gut.
> 
> But anyway, I was just walking in a funk, not really noticing where I was going, and stumbled on one of those women’s lib protests they have on the university campus sometimes. Never saw one up close before, but I heard about them, but man, nothing you could ever describe prepares you for three dozen women shouting at you and lighting their bras on fire. And one of them, apparently, belonged to this girl.
> 
> She didn’t throw it at my head, it’s not like she was aiming or anything. (That’s what she says. I think she’s secretly out to get me.) This was her first time at a protest like this--like any kind of protest, she said--and when she put the lighter up to the material, she wasn’t expecting it to, well...go up like it did. (A word of wisdom, Neal: ladies’ bras are made of really fucking flammable stuff.) So, discovering immediately that she doesn’t like fire at all, she threw it away from her--and onto me.
> 
> I’m fine, if you’re asking. Considering you’re risking your life every day, and dodging bullets instead of flaming bras, I assume you’re not asking. But if you are, I’m fine.
> 
> When she came up to apologize for...well, for almost lighting me on fire...we got to talking, preferably far away from the protesting crowd and other threats of immolation. Her name’s Jennie; she goes to the public high school on the north side of town, that’s why we’ve never seen her before. Well, I should say, “went:” she just graduated and was looking into the campus on the University of Oklahoma, try to get her bearings before starting freshman year. One thing leads to another, and the perfectly nice women’s society she was planning to join starts whipping off their underclothes, declaring them slavish constructs of the oppressive patriarchy. Poor Jennie just wanted her new college friends to like her.
> 
> But she wasn’t just in it for the social connections: she wants to make a difference, really play an active part in women getting equal rights. It’s why she wanted to join the club, but she kinda learned the hard way yesterday that protest organizations are a lot less about passing legislation and getting real change to happen, and more about making waves and burning things.
> 
> But enough about activism. That’s not all there is to Jennie, anyway. We talked all the rest of the day about music; I found out she tends to like all the same musicians I do, the ones that you usually bitch are too mainstream. (I don’t care if you say Bob Dylan sold out by going electric, it hasn’t changed his legend any and Jennie agrees.) And in between talking about music and bra-burning we passed by a lady walking a dachshund and I can’t tell which one of us fawned over the little guy more. There’s a huge Who concert going on in August at the university campus in Oklahoma City; the guys and I hadn’t planned to go, I mean, how the hell would we snag tickets to that? But Jennie said she’s got a friend at the university programming board, and she’ll call in a favor, so we might actually be able to go.
> 
> Jennie and me, I mean, and the rest of the guys, if she can get the extra tickets. Not the dachshund. I don’t think we’ll be able to take him along.
> 
> I really wish you could go with us, too, Neal. I mean...it’s the Who. I can’t imagine seeing them in concert after listening to all of their records, after learning every chord and note to My Generation (which I just did, and Christ on a cracker Neal, Pete Townsend is a genius). Just...experiencing all of that live, the music running through your veins as it’s pouring out of their hands. I’d give just about anything for you to be there for it, instead of where you are right now.
> 
> And, I think you’d really like Jennie, if you met her. And I don’t mean, “meet” her; God, don’t do that. I think I might get jealous if you did.
> 
> Say hi to Bryan for me,  
>  Andy P. Skib

***

There were these letters, Bryan told him once--he trusted things that Bryan told him about being in-country, like how to tell if your water’s safe to drink, and that salt tablets and mosquito netting could essentially save your life out there. There were these letters, that came in every week, just like every other piece of mail going to the grunts, looking innocent enough in their hand-written address labels and military air postage. But inside each of these letters held big secrets, stuff no one wanted to read, not even the soldiers to which they were addressed. Wives and girlfriends who had pledged to wait for them, writing diligently, waving their Old Glories and looking out their tract-home windows for a sign of their G.I. heading home...suddenly, not, anymore.

These were the Dear John letters, though Bryan admitted he never met any grunt named John who ever got one. The people who promised they would wait forever writing to tell their men that they couldn’t, that the wait was too long and forever was too large. They came so often it was becoming a common game around the army camps to watch young soldiers’ faces as they examined their mail, searching for a shocked face, the drop of a smile into a devastated frown. “There’s a Dear John” was the call when such an expression was found, but it wasn’t a mark of sympathy or ridicule. Neal knew that when a soldier saw another man get that letter, they were pitying him.

He refused to believe this was that kind of letter.

Neal had no reason to consider it one: Dear Johns were apologetic, remorseful, and there was nothing in this letter but Andy’s excitement over meeting someone new. There was no claim Neal could have made, nothing to cement them but their songs and their friendship; they were friends, and fuck, that’s what friends do, they tell each other about things like this.

They were friends, his conscience raged at him, and he was a fool to hope it could be anything different.

But his heart, the one that lived and thrived on memories to help him make it out of there alive, felt at odds with his common sense. It had lasted only a moment, a brief few seconds months before that had felt like all time had stopped to Neal; but it had meant more than the weeks spent in basic, the nights scared and alone in the sweltering Vietnamese jungle. If Neal closed his eyes and ignored the sound of foreign insects in the night, he could still remember how it felt: Andy’s skin on his fingertips, lips brushing against his. He could recall forgetting to breathe when Andy responded, pressing in closer, eyes fluttering shut, waiting for Neal. His brain told him he was an idiot but his heart, oh--it reminded him why this hurt in the first place.

“Hey, there’s a Dear John if I ever saw one!”

Startled, Neal looked up, not realizing the death grip with which he held Andy’s letter or the way his controlled expression gave his heart away. It was an approaching grunt from another unit, short and squat and with a mouth just as big; someone Neal had never spoken with, much less divulged the content of his letters to. Neal’s lip curled up into a sneer, his eyes seeing red. If they had ever met before, that dumb grunt would have known why you didn’t joke about letters home with Neal.

The soldier stopped in his tracks when he saw the expression change swiftly on Neal’s face, saw the ferocity in his eyes as he rose from his seat. With one hand gripping the letter and the other curling into a tight fist, Neal took a few steps closer towards the grunt, intent on making sure he never spied a Dear John face--or much of anything--again.

But a strong arm shot up from nowhere to meet with his fist, locking Neal’s arm at the elbow, and an equally strong, authoritative voice barked in his ear. “Tiemann!” He’d known that voice before, but never like this: Bryan promised Neal he’d probably never have to pull rank on him, that medals and bronze stars all tarnished in the South Asian mud. But they weren’t in the mud, not now, and Neal was the one who broke that promise, not Bryan, by raising his fist to another soldier.

When Neal resisted, attempting to take another step towards the confused and slightly frightened grunt before them, Bryan’s voice went lower, and sounded more like the friend Neal had in Tulsa than the commanding officer he had become. “You will _stand down_ , Neal,” he said; he hadn’t known what brought on the sudden rage in his old friend, but he could feel it tightening in Neal’s muscles, could hear the threatening growl in his throat. “That’s a request; and if you don’t, it’s a fucking order. My men don’t go around base looking for fights.”

Neal could have tried to protest, explain that it was the hapless grunt’s remark that set him off, but it’d make no difference to Bryan or the U.S. army: a fistfight was a fistfight, and provoked or not he’d be disciplined. And besides, what would be his excuse? To his mind’s own admission Neal had no right to be angry, to act the part of the jilted lover. His emotions were getting the better of him; a dangerous circumstance even in peacetime, but as a soldier, it was damn near deadly.

With a deep sneer he relented, allowing Bryan to pull him away from the conflict, though his insides still burned red with anger. Tasked with controlling his unit, Bryan gave one final shove to Neal’s shoulder before he went off to address the other soldier’s commanding officer, and quell any bad blood Neal may have churned. He threw an authoritative glare back at Neal, daring him to move out of place; resentful, Neal jutted his chin out, moving to take a defiant step forward. The grunt he had never met in his life, the commander he considered his friend...Neal was no longer picky about who he would fight, or how. His stubborn will and his frustrated anger made him want to lash out, at anyone, because those memories were still there, his heart wouldn’t let go of them, and he couldn’t lash out at himself for feeling them.

Before Bryan could notice the toe out of line, another soldier and friend stepped in, this time to protect Neal from himself. “Neal.” David’s voice was even as he stepped in front of Neal, blocking his sight of the retreating grunt, an arm of peace extended towards Neal’s chest. There was sympathy in his voice where Neal had only heard warning and authority in Bryan’s. “Calm down. Jewett’s got this under control; there’s no need to push it further. Let it go.”

“He doesn’t _know_ me,” Neal finally spoke, his voice a dull rasp. The initial anger was dying down, but while its trigger was walking away, the cause was still clutched in Neal’s hand, still resided in his heart. “You don’t just fucking call someone a Dear John.”

David cogitated for a moment, his eyebrow cocked. “No, actually, you _do_ ,” he said to Neal, reminding him of the unwritten soldiers’ code of base conduct. “What you _don’t_ do is start fights with someone just because they called you one. Especially if you’re not _actually_ getting a Dear John letter.” Considering Neal had been David’s closest friend in the army since day one of basic--and considering David hadn’t heard him speak a word about any woman waiting for him on the other side--he thought it was a fair assumption.

His temper showing no signs of retreating, Neal snapped at David. “Fuck off,” he growled, his defenses so high he refused to scale them back, even for a friend who only looked to help. The fist at his side tightened its grip on the letter, bringing it to David’s attention. He had seen enough of Neal’s mail from home before to recognize the handwriting, saw how the neat lettering matched those scribbled onto the songs Neal had showed him.

“Neal,” his voice was softer now, hushed even, and full of concern. His friend wasn’t in any position to receive Dear John letters, but something else... “Is everything alright with Andy?”

Something flashed in Neal’s eyes--it wasn’t fear, David had seen what fear looks like when he’s caught his gaze in combat. But it lasted only a moment, and in the next Neal was swatting David’s arm away, the once peaceful gesture now an interference. “ _Fuck off,_ ” he repeated, this time not sticking around to hear David’s protest. He knew Dave would complain, stand firm and not take whatever hardass shit Neal had to throw at him; that good friends don’t walk away when there’s only a little bit of resistance.

But the last thing Neal felt he needed right now was another _friend_.

It took him hours to cool down, a self-imposed banishment to the corner of the barracks, letting the frustration burn through his system and escape like jungle steam from his mind. He conceded to himself with a clenched jaw that he was overreacting, that his situation--fighting in a foreign country, separated from the life he knew with only Andy’s letters as home--was the only reason he felt hurt; cheated.

When he was done, Neal couldn’t tell if his thoughts were the truth, or if he had merely convinced himself they were, but, like a good soldier, he had to suck it up and take the reality for what it was worth. Andy owed him nothing but the letters he sent, the music they wrote together--

 _Oh, fuck,_ Neal almost choked on his own startling realization, his cigarette dropping from his lips with a cough. _The music_.

It was like a lightswitch had been flipped on in Neal’s head, shedding light on the muddle of confusion and frustration he felt ever since he read Andy’s letter. He reached for his pen and paper, and blindingly, almost possessed, he began to scrawl thoughts, words down onto the page. His lyrics never came first, the notes always preceded them, and Andy often worked with Neal to write the words Andy would inevitably sing; but this time they came flowing from his pen in spurts, stanzas that made no sense together, but somehow felt right.

Neal knew he’d never have to explain them to Andy; when it came to music, to _their_ music, he would always understand.

 

_Where we be_  
 _We’ve come so far_  
 _Where did I go astray from you?_

***

> July 13, 1968
> 
> Oh fucking hell, Neal, are you an idiot. I know I’ve called you an idiot before, but this? Is worse than I thought. This is, they send you to a special school out in the country kind of stupid. And I can’t believe the army’s found it fit to put you in charge of a gun.
> 
> Thanks for your concern and encouragement over my relationship with Jennie. Especially since, you know, I didn’t know I had a relationship with Jennie, much less one that required you giving your blessing or advice on the best places in town to discreetly buy condoms. And thanks a bunch for requesting that I don’t knock her up until you get home, so you can be the best man and take me out to a damn stripper for my bachelor party. If you were going for sarcasm, I’d say leave the comedy to Bob Hope, because it wasn’t funny. And if you were going for sincerity, then not only are you an idiot, you must think I’m one, too.
> 
> Jennie and I aren’t in a relationship; we aren’t even dating, for fuck’s sake. We’re just friends, and yes, we both prefer it that way. Sure, we talk about music, and school, and everyday things, but...it’s different than when I talk with the guys about things. It’s even different than when I’m with you.
> 
> See, we got all that out in the open right away; I’m not interested in Jennie as anything other than a good friend, and she feels the same. (I know, it’s hard to believe I’m not irresistible towards everyone. I’m coming to terms with it, slowly.) She’s got a boyfriend, actually: old friends, been together since freshman year, known each other basically since they could walk. He’s over there, too, got drafted like you, though he just ended up there about two weeks ago. And Jennie’s been trying to keep a strong front about it, but when I told her that my best friend was fighting, too, she revealed that she’s...well, she’s damn terrified.
> 
> I guess I can’t blame her any.
> 
> But that’s what we ended up bonding on the most, Neal. Like I told you before, it’s different talking to the guys about the war; Travis acts like he won the damn lottery with his exemption status, and Nick hardly acts like anything’s changed, like you were never here in the first place sometimes. And those fucking pissers at school, ones who have brothers in the war, they just complain that Mommy and Daddy put all their attention on the soldier in the family now. Life’s just been feeling so...wrong since you left. Things aren’t supposed to be going along like normal, but they do, and no one else understood why the hell I was feeling this way, no one was getting it.
> 
> Until I met Jennie. And we talk about music, and school, and just normal teenager stuff. But we also share how “normal” just doesn’t feel right anymore. She talks about how she misses her boyfriend, and I say how it’s been shit without you here. We just, I don’t know...connect, in a way I haven’t been able to with anyone else I know in Tulsa.
> 
> That’s why I really wanted to tell you about meeting Jennie. It’s just comforting to have someone to talk to that really knows what it’s like, being here, and you being there. Shit, “comforting” isn’t even the right word to describe it...it’s been fucking essential.
> 
> She just got her first letter back from in country, actually--she wants to write to him every day, just to let him know she still cares, and I told her, all that’s gonna give him is a lot of extra baggage to carry around out there. She just wants to ease any of his worries, but his latest letter only gave her more: she’s thinking he’s not telling her the whole truth about his life out there. I saw the letter; he kept talking about how everything’s fine out there, they’re not seeing much combat, he’s getting to travel and life’s a fucking breeze. And she’s got a feeling--and because I told her I know\--he’s bullshitting her.
> 
> And I know he’s probably just doing it so Jennie doesn’t worry, he wouldn’t want his girl to think he’s ass-deep in mud and grass fearing for his life everyday, wondering if that’s the day he’s finally going to bite it. But she just wants to hear the truth from him, no matter how rough, or unpleasant, or frightening.
> 
> You know, that’s something I always thought we had covered: you wanted these letters to be the one space you could be truthful, to really say how bad of a shithole you were in, to gripe and bitch when you’re frustrated and to tell me you’re scared with impunity. What these letters weren’t for is feeding each other bullshit and lying to try to make either of us feel better. Your entire last letter reeked of it: it almost made me sick to read. Not because you’ve got no fucking sarcastic wit over paper, but because you actually expected me to believe the words you were writing.
> 
> I’m no fucking lie detector, Neal, but I can see through your bullshit from half a world away. I don’t like it, and I don’t think you like it, either.
> 
> Because that song...that song is really you talking. Not what you think I want to hear; not some bravado shit you’ve put down on paper to make something hurt less. You can’t lie to me in your letters, but I know you won’t lie to me in your music. It’s too precious to you, to both of us.
> 
> Look, I can talk till I’m blue about all this, but just like I can see through your bullshit, you can read mine. Just...don’t send me anything like that last letter, ever again. It’s not the Neal I know; not a Neal who hides behind thinly-veiled sarcasm, who builds a wall between himself and his best friend when they need each other the most. Keep showing me the Neal in that song, please; the one who bares his heart in bars of music.
> 
> You didn’t give any instructions on whether you wanted me to tweak the song or not, but I’m not sending any back regardless. It’s perfect exactly the way it is.
> 
> Andy P. Skib
> 
> P.S. Heaven, Hell--fuck it, I’d follow you anywhere. As long as it meant guiding you back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from this chapter are from the song "[Til I'm Blue](http://bit.ly/106Oio2) off of MWK's 2005 album Judging A Bullet. (And, as some may know, is one of my favorite MWK and Skibmann songs. ;-))


	6. Chapter 6

Neal never sent another letter to Andy hiding behind disguising words and military-grade lies; he left the Norman Rockwell paintings of Vietnam for his mother, when he asked her to send more cigarettes, or bars of soap. Rations at the camp were irregular at best, spoiled and useless at worst: the crates of Playboys and beef jerky sent to boost morale were always in full supply, but what would have really boosted Neal’s morale was food not scraped out of a metal tin, or warm wool socks, or a one-way ticket the fuck out of there. He never asked Andy to send anything, not looking to put his best friend out, but sometimes Andy insisted: a letter in early August came weighted down by metal, a Zippo lighter tucked into the package with the note that it was more practical than a box of matches.

His letters grew less frequent as the time away from the safety of the camp diminished: Bryan muttered once that the higher-ups must have caught wind that the unit was treating the base like it was the Hilton and decided to finally put them to work. Their reconnaissance missions usually brought nothing out of the brush, finding only dead bodies and empty foxholes to report. Some of the men in the unit seemed restless: a tall, stocky grunt named Sarver--the kind that Neal lamented gave Texas a bad name--used to complain that they never saw any action, he’d never get to stare a Charlie in the face and plug him right between the eyes.

The first time the unit encountered VC soldiers--not dead ones but genuine living VC, ones that hide in the brush and shoot and you never see their eyes--the poor bastard Sarver got shot in the temple, went down like a sack of wet flour, dead before he ever fired off his weapon. No one ever complained about the action after that.

It was nothing like how they show it in the movies, Neal thought the first time he watched a man die--searching through that field, shooting through the blinding elephant grass up to his shoulders, finding one mortally wounded VC dressed like a farmer. The movies made death seem so important, so dramatic: someone’d get shot in a standoff, they’d clutch their chest and spin around before convulsing on the floor, giving their last epithet, making their war buddy swear he’d tell the girl he left at home that he loves her. Neal didn’t see any of that in the field that day: no twitching on the floor, no clutching the wound with a dying breath. The VC was barely breathing when Neal reached him, lips moving minutely in a language he couldn’t understand, eyes staring straight out into the idyllic blue sky. Then in a minute the lips stopped moving, and that was the only clue he was dead: eyes never closed, lips never gave their last shuddering breath. Neal kicked the rifle out of the body’s hands anyway, just to be sure. He didn’t want to touch it if he could avoid it.

The worst thing Neal remembered was it wasn’t like the movies at all, because no one gave a damn about these deaths, not even enough to film it like they cared.

You were damn scared, of course--if you weren’t scared you were a fool, and after not too long you’d be a dead fool, and you wouldn’t be feeling much of anything anymore--but no one tried to show it in the light of day. At base the decorum was to talk about anything but the war, going on just outside of their camp walls; on missions and in the field the soldiers kept their mouths shut, not wanting to give their locations away by gabbing to each other like gossiping housewives. Neal had no problem keeping silent, but it was always a struggle for David; the boy barely kept his lips zipped once they got back to base, like he had shuttered in all his words for a mission and they came out like water bursting from a dam.

The nights were a different story. The VietCong attacked more at night, peasants armed with ideals as well as guns who knew their childhood lands like they were a part of their blood. You’d hear gunfire out in the distance, every night anew, sometimes faint and distant like firecrackers, other times loud, booming cannon fire--either missiles dropped from their own planes above, or makeshift bombs from the Vietnamese, land mines set to kill. After a few days Neal could gauge their distance just by listening in the dark; after a few weeks the gunfights became so common he stopped listening at all.

Soldiers’ minds started to go at night, those bolts and screws the army banged into their heads in basic slowly unraveling each night in the darkness. Underneath the sound of combat he could hear grown men crying, weeping as softly as they could in their issued cots. The canvas tents felt alive with the nervous trembling of bodies underneath them. Though every man knew about it, each morning nothing was said, and the soldiers went about their tasks at hand.

Neal never cried: it wasn’t that he ain’t no sissy, though he wasn’t, but he had learned damn quick there real manliness wasn’t counted in tears. David ended up being one of the worst offenders, his eyes narrowing and nose scrunching up moments before every time, his head bowed down, fingers between the bridge of his nose. Those that cried too much often went the same way as those who didn’t feel enough, were too eager to kill to know fear: they all ended up either drowned in tears or blood, and shipped home in a plastic sack. Neal and David were the anomalies in camp, the grunt who never cried and the soldier who never stopped himself from crying: they should have been long dead by then, but through their own stubborn wills, they stayed alive.

Instead Neal kept his mind focused on music at night, filling the dark void with thoughts of his guitar, his songs, rather than fear. His fingers hadn’t touched a guitar since basic training in Texas, and they ached for something more familiar to hold than an M-14; but personal items were a luxury in country, and the lighter your baggage was, the better. Although he was separated from his instrument, he wasn’t from the music: Neal could still hear the notes in his head as they should be played, knew the chords and could wrap them around a song just as easy as breathing. David admitted he hadn’t the concentration in country to write from scratch like that, much less the time; but Neal found that time in the darkest hours of the night, blocking out the sounds of gunfire and his fellow soldiers weeping with the music he and Andy shared in his memories.

Andy said he wouldn’t stand for any more of Neal lying to him in his letters, and Neal obliged; but he also said he wanted to know everything, for Neal not to hold back to make Andy feel better, to make a friend’s separation hurt less, and that was something Neal could not do. It was not to spare Andy the gruesome details of war--from the way it was being fought, Neal would put good money Andy’d be finding out on his own tour in country--but to spare himself having to relive it through words. There were many memories Neal had on the battlefield that he preferred to stay there, so many actions he would much rather choose to forget. He didn’t like to realize all the horror stories fed to them through their evening news were not only true, but so much more defined here, so stark it was impossible to ignore.

He didn’t want to think about that VC he found in the brush, or any other people he might have killed, not even to Andy. There were some words that were never meant to find paper.

Instead Neal’s letters were filled with the brief, happy moments he shared with his unit in base camp, whiling away the times between missions, pushing the worries of soldiers aside for a time and learning how to be boys again. Those times were never often but every man in that country cherished them like fresh, bountiful food, and Neal was no different: Vietnam was such a foreign place to him, filled with jungles of homesickness and dread. It was a celebration to have some sense of normalcy.

But Neal knew, from the back of his mind to the pit of his stomach and every inch in between, nothing was going to feel normal again until he was reunited with his music, with Andy...until he returned home.

“Better?”

Neal’s head popped up at the sound of the familiar voice, pen still poised above the sheets of paper. David had a stack of letters in his hand as well when he approached; Neal assumed it was his most recent set of correspondence to his widespread family, the weekly ones sent to his two brothers at the top of the pile. Neal shot him a quizzical look, and David smiled humbly as he explained himself.

“With Andy,” he said, and pointed to the papers spread upon Neal’s thigh. Neal learned quick that David was an observant little fucker with a curious streak that’d rival an alley cat’s. There couldn’t have been any other person in the world Neal was writing that letter for; the handwritten guitar tabs gave it away. David peered in closer to Neal’s face, examining the expression, the only grunt permitted to invade his personal space so readily. “You don’t look like you’re fixin’ to beat someone unconscious this week. So I assumed things are better.”

Neal couldn’t keep a stony face for long; eyes flitting back down to the letter, he smiled, shaking his head. He hadn’t figured anyone would give two shits about him in the army when he was drafted, but David wormed his way in, and didn’t take no for an answer. “Yeah,” he admitted, remembering his violent reaction to Andy’s letter, and the wave of familiar relief that washed over him when Andy sent him the response, berating Neal for even thinking he’d sleep with the girl. If Andy was so keen on just being friends with her, Neal really did have to meet this Jennie. “Things...are better.”

Shooting him a grin, David slapped a hand on Neal’s back as he settled down next to him. Almost immediately another soul joined them, a scrawny, scraggly thing that was even more attached at David’s hip than David was at Neal’s. His attentions quickly diverted from Neal’s letter, David greeted his furry companion with a generous rub of his ears. “You gonna tell him about our new pet?” he asked, his focus still on the dog, whose tail was wagging furiously into the ground from the lavish attention.

“That thing is your pet, not ours,” Neal clarified, smile curving around the cigarette in his mouth. A stray dog, half-starved, patches of fur seared off by brush fires, had wandered into camp earlier that week, and while most of the unit wanted to use it for target practice, David saved him from a dire fate and adopted him. Insisting that the company take him in as their mascot, he had been giving up half his rations to feed the poor creature, who took quickly to his new owner, knowing David Cook was his only chance at survival. Neal liked to argue that the wretched beast would bring disease and fleas to the camp, but it was only to give David a tough time; despite himself, he’d taken a shine to the old thing, too.

He looked back at the letter: in between stretches of orphan music, chords without songs that invaded Neal’s head until they were on paper, were details of the blissfully mundane in camp, the moments of peaceful boredom every soldier came to appreciate in the field. In his letters Andy spoke so much about what he has _done_ , what he and the friends Neal left behind plan to _do_ in the last weeks of summer before Andy’s last year of school; but to Neal, _doing_ meant being sent out on patrols, meant risking your life just walking into a village or out into a rice paddy. When he came back-- _if_ , Neal corrected himself, because _when_ meant overconfidence and overconfidence usually meant a body bag--he wanted Andy to understand why he’d be more than content to do a whole shitload of _nothing_.

Neal held the letter up to show David his handiwork. “Right now I’m telling him ‘bout that time it rained, when we were right near that one village--”

He didn’t even have to finish the story, finish his sentence, before David burst out into a grin, eyes crinkling at their edges with laughter, and he slapped his knee so loudly the dog startled and cowered underneath their bench. Fresh running water was a luxury in country that most soldiers only knew when Mother Nature bestowed it upon them; each man learned early on to carry a bar of soap with them while on patrol, to get in a good wash while the washing was good. If not for Vietnam’s rainy season, Neal thought, they’d all smell like David’s new pet.

“You mean when Luke stripped and jumped out into the rice paddy?” David’s laugh was a bark quite reminiscent of his friend underneath the bench as he recalled the unit’s shenanigans while on patrol.

“Beltin’ out songs like fuckin’ Gene Kelly...”

“And when he got back,” David was damn near giggling now. “All his clothes were just _magically_ nowhere to be found.”

Neal’s grin was so indulgently wide he nearly dropped his cigarette. “I have no idea how that happened, really.”

David took his free arm and draped it over Neal’s shoulders. “I knew I befriended you for a reason, Tiemann.”

“Because you had to have a specific reason for it,” Neal scoffed, chuckling. “You’re like the fucking mayor of this camp, Dave. You’d make best friends with a toaster if we had one.”

The only protest David could give was a dramatic rolling of his eyes and a shrug; he hated admitting when Neal was right, but this time it was irrefutable. “I am _friends_ with everyone,” he corrected. “But you’re the only one I’d qualify with a ‘best.’ You and this old fella.” He reached down underneath the bench and patted a hand against the dog’s frail flank; even with half a soldier’s rations the dog was still barely more than fur and bones.

He should have been offended by being compared to a flea-bitten stray, but it comforted Neal somehow; practically speaking, David was less likely to let Neal die if he considered him his best friend out in the field. Sentimentally speaking, he was already envisioning David finally meeting Andy one day, the two different lives of Neal’s converging, maybe all three sitting down to write a song or two.

Instead he snorted, turning his attention back to finishing his letter. “Your hand’s your best friend,” he jokingly muttered under his breath, loud enough for David to hear.

In retaliation Neal received a _whack_ against the back of his head from the papers in David’s hand. “You’ll take my befriending and you’ll like it, dammit!”

“Ow! Hey, that actually fucking hurt,” Neal commented, shirking away from David in case he chose to inflict a second blow. He spied the stack of papers in David’s hand and realized why. “Shit, Cook, are you writing letters to every fucker in Missouri?!”

It was then that the grin spread across David’s face dropped, the laughs petering out to an awkward clearing of his throat. The grip on his letters tightened as he contemplated, staring at them in his hands, boring a hole straight through them with his eyes. Finally he heaved a deep sigh and passed them over to Neal. “I’m only showing you these _because_ you’re my best friend here,” he said, his voice soft and weary.

Neal fanned out the sheets of paper, quickly scanning the salutations and bodies of the letters, and recognized immediately that these were no notes of endearment destined for the mailboxes of any Cooks in America. Some of the letters were addressed to names he recognized: girlfriends of fellow soldiers, names he heard tossed across foxholes to pass the time. Familiar last names that were now pressed into dirt-cold dogtags, imprinted in blood. There was one for every man they lost so far, at least, letters addressed to mothers looking out their windows to see a son that will never return; sweethearts who wait in vain, rings on their fingers tarnished with unfulfilled promises. Neal gulped, and his hands trembled, finally realizing to where these letters were bound.

“The problem with knowing everyone at camp,” David said, his hand already reaching back for his heavy charge. “Is when they go...you know.”

The happy, friendly disposition Neal came to recognize so well as David’s was gone now, buried underneath a deep frown and a furrow of his brow. His arms sagged low into his lap when Neal returned the letters to him, as if it was a weight he could just barely carry on his own. “You didn’t have to--” Neal began, but David stopped him with a stubborn shake of his head.

“My dad was stationed in Panama, back in the 40s,” he started, remembering the war stories he was told as a child, and how his father had only talked about the good times, the victories, and had never told him everything. “Used to tell me about what happened to the guys who didn’t make it home. The government only sends one emotionless letter and a damn flag to the poor schmuck’s mother once he bites it.”

“Shit,” Neal muttered. Good ol’ Uncle Sam wasn’t known for his heartfelt condolences.

David shook his head; it got worse. “And girlfriends? Buddies? They don’t get any notice; nothing. Might not hear about it for weeks.” His father talked about those times, too, when he worked in the military’s postal department, sorting letters to be delivered and sending far too many of them back. “Only way they find out is if a letter they’ve sent to their man comes back, stamped with a big red ‘DECEASED’ on the envelope.”

Neal’s mouth went dry, the sticky South Asian air feeling no longer adequate to fill up his lungs. Those letters home were harsh enough, but to only discover a loved one was dead by returned mail, in such a brutal fashion... He thought of the many letters Andy had been sending him, how he had recently half-warned and half-offered to write every day so Neal would not grow lonely. He couldn’t imagine those letters returned, unread, a cold, unfeeling stamp Andy’s only notice that no one would ever read them again. Neal had feared dying in the war before--fuck, he’d be a fool to have never been afraid of death, not when it stares you in the face and surrounds you every day--but he never felt it like this, of having something more than his own skin to lose.

“So I’m doing this.” David holds up the stack of letters underneath Neal’s nose again, not noticing Neal’s head dropped in contemplation. “Something...personal, at least. Fought with your fiance in the 138th, great guy, always sticking his neck out for others...just some typical bullshit. They deserve to hear something... _anything_.”

But the moment Neal inspected the letters he could tell David was writing above and beyond what anyone considered bullshit: each letter was handwritten and personalized, with stories of the fallen soldiers’ moments with the unit, both good and bad. He never embellished, never lied; Neal’d be hard-pressed to find something positive to say about every one of these grunts, but David had that special ability to seek out the good in every person, find the surliest asshole in the whole base and wheedle out his heart of gold. Hell, he made that surly asshole his best friend.

Neal pretended not to notice the ink splotches on the papers, the letters where David cried over the loss of fallen soldiers. Though he never thought to before, at that moment Neal vowed never to ask David why he cried at the drop of a fucking hat, and swore to beat the insensitive shit of any soldier or officer who ever dared.

When he looked back up at David’s face, he saw not the emotional man who had become his friend, but a stony, serious expression--something Neal himself was more likely to wear. “I’m telling you right now, Tiemann,” he said sternly, without any of the veiled playfulness Neal had come to know from him. “You? You’re not allowed.”

“To what?”

“To die,” David said simply; it rolled off his tongue like mentioning the weather. “‘Cause then I’d have to write one of these--” he shook the stack of letters in his hand, each one now feeling heavier than a simple sheet of paper with the words they carried. “--To him.” And he ended by jabbing a finger at the letter in Neal’s hand, the one addressed to Andy, scrawled with music and dreams; full of life, unlike the ones David had spent all day writing.

David shook his head again, adamant. “I’m not,” he insisted. “I...can’t.” With a deep, shaky breath, David tried to knock the sentimentality out of himself, hiding his sensitivity underneath a cough. “So you’re just...not allowed. You got that, Neal?”

Before Neal could answer, David was giving him a parting slap on the knee as he rose from the bench. “I think I’m gonna head to mess,” he said, the dog faithfully following in his footsteps. “See if I can scrounge up some leftovers for this old boy.” But when he left with a friendly wave goodbye, the dog trotting at his heels, Neal noticed David headed towards the barracks again, away from the kitchens, and he wondered with a heavy heart if his friend was off to finish even more of those letters.

He looked back down at the letter in his lap, suddenly ashamed of the mundane stories he wrote to Andy, the inconsequential and unimportant moments Neal held onto to stay sane. Not sparing the energy or paper space to scratch out what he had already written, he scribbled out a quick explanation to Andy on why he was cutting his narrative short, and why his story about Luke and the missing fatigues was neither interesting nor funny. With a glance at the empty space once held by his friend and that damned mongrel of his, Neal started writing David’s request, telling the tale of the stray pup who, out of the kindness of a soldier’s heart, was no longer a stray. Out of all the letters being sent from their unit that day, Neal thought that at least one of them should contain a happy ending.

***  


“This--this is--” Nick was so excited Andy almost thought he would jump right out of his seat, shoot up through the skies like a rocket. “Holy shit, man! Fucking Who!”

Andy chuckled over the din of the audience, the excited buzz circulating through the crowd. Though possibly not as exuberant, everyone felt about the same as Nick did that night. “You sure you’ve only had beer tonight, man?” he asked. Nick shrugged, his mouth turning into a smirk, before he turned his attention back to the waiting stage. He was pleading the fifth on that one.

While he wasn’t flying to the moon like Nick any time soon, Andy understood the sentiment: the amphitheater was full to the brim with concertgoers, people still streaming in and filling each seat, a sight rarely witnessed in such a hum-drum Midwest town like Oklahoma City. It hadn’t even started yet and still there was a feeling in the air, some kind of electricity Andy couldn’t explain, a charge of excitement waiting for its trigger. Ten thousand people all anticipating the same thing, waiting to share the moment, that one experience that could make their year.

Nick couldn’t get the words out, but Andy knew them well enough. It was fucking amazing.

They weren’t the only ones feeling it: flanking Andy’s other side, Jennie was nearly bouncing in her seat, neck straining to see if there was any change on the stationary stage. “When do you think they’ll come out?” she asked, her hands gripping at the armrests. “Do you think they’ll play for long?”

“They’re still getting people into their seats, Jen.” Andy placed both hands on each of Jennie’s shoulders, gently and amusingly setting her down in her own seat in an attempt to calm her. “Just wait for it. When it starts...you’ll know.”

Jennie remained in her seat but her neck still craned over the seats in front of her, out of curious habit. “Who would have thought...” she said absently. “The Who’s _huge_. Everyone wants to see them; all over the world, probably. And yet they’re here, in Oklahoma, of all places.”

“Thank you so much for getting the tickets,” Andy said. Though their seats were far from front row--Andy thought they’d require oxygen masks and mountaineering tools for how high they had to climb in the amphitheater--he and Nick wouldn’t have even gotten in the stadium without Jennie, who scored the exclusive tickets off her University of Oklahoma ID. Ever since Neal had started buying him alcohol and taking him to house parties last year, Andy knew the benefits of having college friends, and this was no exception.

“Well, thank you to _Nick_ for driving us all the way to Oklahoma City,” Jennie countered. “I swear, Andy, sometimes I think you deliberately make friends just so you can have people to drive you everywhere.”

Nick leaned over Andy’s seat to address Jennie. “Lady, for Who tickets, I would have _carried_ you two here.”

With a happy sigh Jennie agreed. “It’s just...the _Who_. Once in a lifetime.”

The words rang in Andy’s head, and for a moment his smile dropped, his excitement faltered. Only once in a young lifetime is there an opportunity to see a concert of this caliber, very nearly in their own backyard. He should be thrilled to be there, experience it for himself, but still...there was someone residing in Andy’s mind that should have been there, sharing in that experience, feeling the excitement bubble in his veins.

Once in a lifetime the Who would play in Oklahoma like this, and Neal was missing all of it.

He voiced this to Jennie, softly, once Nick had settled back into his high. Jennie nodded sympathetically; Andy had already told her when she bought the tickets how much he wished Neal were joining them. “I’m sure there’ll be other concerts,” she supplied, but Andy just shook his head.

“It’s not just this...it’s not just tonight.” He took in a deep sigh. “Music is everything to him; it’s how we first got to talking, being friends.” Andy had already told her the story of how they had first met; Neal might never forgive him for revealing to her the tale of the trombone without giving the other man opportunity to explain himself. And he also said they still wrote music together, though the experience was quite different from half a world away and without the sound of Neal’s guitar talents close at hand. He still hadn’t found the will to show Jennie their songs; for now, until Neal could come home and hear the finished product with his own ears and play with his own hands, Andy wanted to keep their music to only themselves.

“And out in Vietnam, there’s...nothing. No music he can get his hands on. Besides the military radio,” he continued, “And they’re not really playing stuff that’s Neal’s style. Too much Hank Williams and Johnny Cash.”

“Hey, there is nothing wrong with the Man in Black,” Nick chimed in, and Andy rolled his eyes, smiling. Even in the thick of a Who concert audience, Nick could never let go of his country roots.

When he turned back to Jennie his voice grew even quieter, barely audible over the buzz of the audience. “I just...can’t imagine living without music. Me, even, but Neal? It’s got to be impossible for him, being there with just what’s in his head, what we write on paper. I don’t know how he’s lasted this long, even.” Andy’s gaze dropped down to his hands, remembering when they held Neal’s guitar, how it only felt right when he was playing one of his songs--one of _their_ songs. He couldn’t handle that being taken away from either of them. “I want to send him records but he says they’ll just break in transit, and he’s got nowhere to play them, anyway.”

He frowned when he saw the concerned look on Jennie’s face: well, here he goes, doting on his poor friend again, and bringing down the excitement of the concert while he was at it. But in the next moment she smiled sweetly, sympathy replacing the concern. Even if she didn’t feel the same about the details, she understood the sentiment all the same. “It really matters to you, doesn’t it,” she said, draping a friendly arm around Andy’s shoulders.

“He’s my friend,” he said automatically. The one thing he hadn’t told Jennie about, hadn’t breathed a word of to anyone, were the thoughts he had been having about Neal, over those small, short moments months ago when they kissed and time seemed to stop; or how he had been thinking about that moment, and of Neal, in ways that were quite different from friends. “If it matters to him, then it matters to me.”

“Well, if you can’t send the music to him,” she reasoned, “Then send him what you _can_.”

With her free hand she reached over, down into Andy’s lap. “Jennie--”

But his startled protests died in his mouth as Jennie procured what she was looking for. She held up the Nikon to his face; he had grown so comfortable keeping it near him in the recent weeks he even forgot he had it. “Take some pictures. He can get photos, right? So let him know what the concert felt like, even if you can’t send him what the concert sounded like.”

Andy smiled, though in the back of his mind he knew a photograph couldn’t possibly carry the kinetic energy of a concert; Neal wouldn’t be able to feel the music as Andy knew he should. “It’s so far away,” he said as an excuse instead; pointing towards the stage, Andy and Jennie could see sound crews double-checking the microphones and equipment, milling about the stage like ants at a picnic. “He’s gonna wonder why I even bothered.”

“With the way you two care about music?” Jennie laughed. “No, he’s not.” She settled back into her seat, the camera resting now in her own hands, as she looked through the Nikon’s viewfinder, adjusting the focus. “Besides, it wouldn’t be fair if the photos came out closer for him than what we actually saw. If I can’t see Roger Daltrey’s gorgeous face, then Neal can’t, either.”

At the mention of the Who’s frontman--coupled with the dreamy look on Jennie’s face--Andy had to clamp a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing. “Daltrey?!” he said through his fingers incredulously. “You’re a Daltrey girl. Really.”

Jennie seemed unfazed by the apparent shaming her friend was trying to inflict upon her. “God, who _isn’t_?” With her gaze still focused on the stage through Andy’s camera, she didn’t notice how Andy’s eyes rolled dramatically at her gushing. She went on. “He’s got it all: the looks, the voice--oh, that _voice_. Rough and ragged when it needs to be, but so pretty on those soft songs...” She sighed with a gentle smile to herself, and Andy was glad they had skipped out on dinner, or else he would have been sick.

“And he’s the lead singer,” she said matter-of-factly. “He’s the face of the Who. Who wouldn’t love him?”

Andy tried not to scoff in her face. It was just so... _typical_ he thought, for someone to be pulled in by the draw of a frontman, the bravado of a lead singer. Daltrey had his merits, but he was just a voice, just a pretty face; he was the vessel for the brilliant music he sang, not its creator. It was Pete Townsend that earned Andy’s admiration, the guitarist, the songwriter of the band; the poet. What Jennie had said was true: Daltrey could have been considered the face of the Who, but then, he considered, Townsend had to be its heart.

Another sigh rose from her lips, and it put any question of a romantic relationship immediately to rest in his eyes, because Jennie preferred the frontman, and Andy preferred the songwriter.

Suddenly the lens was trained on Andy: he started a bit from the camera’s proximity to his face, Jennie’s playful smile hidden behind its casing. “And he’s got those big, beautiful expressive eyes,” she cooed as she focused on her new subject, who blushed now that he was in front of the camera and not behind it. “You know I’m a huge sucker for beautiful eyes.”

Smirking, Andy feigned annoyance at Jennie, holding up his hand with a middle finger raised, as she pressed down on the shutter.

***  


>   
>  So that’s the whole story. You can blame these photos on Jennie, I suppose; especially the one of me, she stole the camera from me and took it while I wasn’t ready. (Okay, I might have been ready, but I wasn’t particularly willing.) The finger’s not any reflection of you, don’t worry; you know I just prefer being on the other end of the camera. Easier for blackmail purposes later on.
> 
> The photos of the concert itself came out rather lame. I told Jennie that we were too far for anything to come out, but she insisted that I take them and send them to you, that you’d want to experience whatever you could of the concert in any way you could get it. It was a nice gesture, and easy enough now that Alexis taught me how to use her darkroom, but I knew right from the start this wouldn’t be enough for you. It’s not that you’re not a visual person, but I knew it’d take more for you to accept a concert experience than a few faraway shots of a stage. I mean, you can barely tell it’s the Who from where we were sitting. Fuck, you can barely tell it’s a concert from where we were, really.
> 
> But the moment the lights went down and they took the stage, their silhouettes emerging one by one, and that first deep, amplified chord of music hitting the audience...I knew right then, Neal, that no photo could ever satisfy you over this.
> 
> From that first note to the very last encore--and yes, there was more than one encore, and holy fuck if I wasn’t screaming my head off by that time--the atmosphere in the amphitheater was incredible. Every person in that place was on their feet, excited beyond measure, listening to every beat and singing along to every word. And the band drank it in, fed of all of that energy and put it back into their music, playing like their lives depended on it, like their instruments made the blood pump in their hearts and the air breathe into their lungs. The better the music got, the more the crowd loved it--and the louder the crowd cheered, the better the music became. It was a stellar experience that I never wanted to end.
> 
> I swear, I wasn’t high while I was there. Or while I’m writing this.
> 
> That’s why I knew photographs wouldn’t be enough. Because you can’t feel the music through your bones in just a photograph; you can’t see the audience, hear them singing every word along with the band, sharing it as a group, being in love with the experience. Before the concert started I fucking hated that you weren’t there to see it, because it’s the fucking Who, man, and I needed someone there that wasn’t tripping balls or fawning over Roger Daltrey right next to me. But once it was going on, and every minute afterwards, I’ve wished that you could have been there not just because you’d love it--and you would--but because you’d understand it.
> 
> That’s what I want, Neal. For you...for us. Playing in packed theaters and feeling the energy and movement of the crowd right in front of you. The heat from the lights as we’re playing, feeling the music--our music--deep within our veins. I want to play our music for thousands, maybe millions of people. Maybe even on television. Because that feeling, Neal, that those musicians must have gotten when everybody cheered for them and sang along to every song...it’s what I want for you. I want everyone to know your music; I want to share your words with the world.
> 
> When you get back, I swear we’re going to a concert--a good one, not anyone who’d be playing in Tulsa anyway--and you’re going to get that feeling. The minute you do, I know it’ll be your dream, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Who did perform in Oklahoma City in the summer of 1968, but it was at [Wedgewood Village Amusement Park](http://www.thewholive.net/concert/index.php?id=919&GroupID=1), not a University of Oklahoma ampitheater. (But I'm sure Andy's sentiments would have been the same.)


	7. Chapter 7

In the passing months Andy found with practice some of the rough-hewn tones his voice needed to carry the music Neal sent him, though his self-doubt still needled him, worrying that once his friend came back, it wouldn’t be enough. He practiced their craft diligently, training with difficult covers on his own guitar and mastering their handwritten songs on Neal’s, giving both instruments good exercise, keeping them worn in and well-loved for Neal’s return. Each draft they wrote to each other, perfected through their letters, was kept in a special folder where only Andy knew its contents; most of their songs had only been heard in Neal’s mind, and when his tour was slated to end, Andy wanted to make sure the first to hear their finished works would be him.

Arguably Andy should have had even more time to practice lately: the start of the new school year--Andy’s last--brought him changes that threatened to make his senior year a lonely one. Merely weeks after their trek to Oklahoma City for the Who concert, Jennie made her way there permanently for her freshman year at the university, their goodbye a tearful one, and another of his friends to whom he promised he would write. Searching for his own musical epiphany, Travis left town unceremoniously and headed for Nashville; Andy only discovered his whereabouts when he received a postcard from the Grand Ole Opry. And his senior class--though Andy could hardly say they were _friends_ \--was short dozens of students, boys Andy’s age and months older finding themselves the target of the inevitable draft. Some took their chances and enlisted early; others fled in hopes the draft boards would never find them. But, like the soldiers themselves, they were gone, a missing hole in the heart of Tulsa that no one dared to mention.

Almost no one, anyway: Andy had met a number of people who felt the same as he over the war, similarly lost in a fog of the world feeling different, emptier, while the rest of the population went along its business as if the evening news never applied to them. His first day back to high school brought Andy face-to-face with Mr. Anderson, the history teacher last year who taught him more about recent history than anything in the syllabus. He worried at first that they might butt heads again, but soon he realized the teacher was sympathetic--and a bit worried personally.

“Fewer and fewer names on the roster,” he lamented over a clipboard. “Should be in the classroom, not in a dang war...” He clucked his tongue in disapproval, shaking his head, before he addressed Andy. “Didn’t see your name here, either; thought you were drafted just like the rest of ‘em.”

Andy explained his lighter courseload to the teacher, his benefit of being a senior, and why another year cooped up in a stuffy history class was just about the worst way he wanted to spend his year. “No offense,” he said, his face reddening, realizing he just admitted his disdain for schoolwork to a teacher. He hoped the history department wasn’t chummy with the physics department, he’d actually need to pass that course to graduate...

But the older man just laughed, holding one of his hands up in resignation and insisting that no offense was taken. Tucked into the crook of his other arm was a stack of colorful leaflets; they certainly didn’t look like test booklets or curriculum notes. “They’re invitations,” he replied, handing one of the sheets to Andy. “Well, an open invitation, anyway...was going to post them around the school, but conduct rules and all that...” He rolled his eyes; even inside an institution of education, the bureaucratic red tape was enough to choke anyone.

Preoccupied with scanning the flier in his hands, Andy’s brow furrowed in spite of himself. A meeting on the local university campus that weekend, open to all opposed to the war and the way the government was handling it. Andy’s thoughts instantly returned to the previous school year, when some very vocal opponents left him with a black eye, a simmering anger in his gut, and detention with the teacher standing before him. He hadn’t thought he would be Anderson’s prime candidate to attend a protest rally after that--

“Not a protest; not anything organized yet,” Mr. Anderson explained, mitigating the situation. “I’m not sending any high school kids to sit-ins; boy, would I hear from your parents about that.” It was just an informal meeting, he said, a place for young people like Andy to talk about their views on the war, and the draft. If the youth of the nation was being sent overseas en masse to die in combat, then at the very least, they should have a say in the matter.

Andy was hesitant at first; he remembered the last time he stumbled upon a political organization on the university campus, when he almost lost his life to flaming women’s undergarments. Besides, he thought to himself with a frown, he wasn’t quite sure what his views even were on the matter. He despised the draft for this time bomb it placed on every eighteen-year old in the country, for forcing a machine gun into his best friend’s hand and wrenching away the guitar that belonged there instead. But he was no fool, he saw the evening news: protesters who hated the war found easy targets in the absent soldiers, condemning and blaming them for their complacency. If there was one thing Andy refused to do, it was lose his faith in the soldiers, and one particular soldier; his soldier.

He voiced this concern to the teacher, whose face turned grim. He said he couldn’t guarantee there’d be no badmouthing of the troops, but he refused to stand for it, either. “They’re just boys,” he said, shaking his head. “And they just want to come home.”

Although Andy was still wary, Mr. Anderson promised him that if the meeting went sour they would both stand up and leave--a courtesy the history teacher claimed was the least he could do for his students. But it wasn’t until Anderson let slip that there would also be free pizza at the meeting that Andy finally decided to attend.

But the night of the meeting, when Andy stopped off at home after school for a quick dinner--because even though these peaceniks promised pizza, there was no telling if there’d be any left when he got there, or how much he could have, and he’d need some kind of meal, he was still growing, surely--he found a letter waiting for him in the front hall. Never letting even an hour’s distraction come between him and Neal’s letters, Andy tore into the envelope as always, with the anticipation of a child with his first present at Christmas.

The news that awaited him, however, was far from a gift.

***  


>   
>  October 3, 1968
> 
> Don’t freak out, Skib.
> 
> I know you’re a fucking worrywart, especially about what’s going on over here, and you’ll take this whole thing out of proportion and be a damn wreck. So just stay calm, be cool--the last thing I need is your mother hollering at me because I gave her son a heart attack before he even graduated high school.
> 
> I’m writing this to you from the hospital here. It’s just a field hospital, something they set up a few miles north of base camp, so still no hoity-toity amenities like walls or working plumbing or anything that spectacular. I really shouldn’t be up writing this, the doctors said, but they also said that all my smoking was probably gonna kill me, and fuck them if they think I’m going to stop doing either. There’s light all around from some generators because the hospital’s never quiet, there’s always something going on, some grunts being carted in or somebody dying. I’m just lucky I found some blank paper, or else I’d be sending you some letters written on bedsheets right about now.
> 
> We were out sweeping a free-fire zone last night on a reconnaissance mission; I don’t like those zones at all, they’re supposed to be areas we’ve cleared and anyone in there could be considered a hostile, but they’re just flimsy fucking reasons that give some dumbass soldiers a reason to shoot at anything that moves. (Yeager did that, once, and he ended up shooting a goat. That goat was gunnin’ for us, I swear.) We weren’t supposed to find anything, just like always, just walking through the fields and giving the all-clear. But it was night, and we weren’t so lucky.
> 
> Someone triggered a flash mine that must have been planted after the place was cleared the first time; VC could’ve dropped it into an old foxhole or something, maybe some dipshit missed it originally, I don’t know. I don’t even know if one of our guys had tripped it, ‘cause we’re all still standing, we’ve all got the same number of limbs we had going in there, and if one of us had tripped it that definitely wouldn’t be the case. But it went off all the same, just a bright light of explosion, fucking hell of a noise, like shooting a firecracker off right inside your eardrum. I don’t even remember a whole lot of it, just the light and the noise knocking the wind out of me, then hearing nothing for a little while, seeing nothing but spots swimming past my eyes.
> 
> If not for those fucking spots, though, I would’ve sworn I was dead right then and there.
> 
> They say I blacked out for a little while, completely unresponsive; Dave told me later that he would have thought I was dead, too, if not for my pulse and the fact that “Neal Tiemann’s not dying from some pussy landmine.” I don’t remember any of it, which, yeah, guess that means I did black out; the last thing I remember was waking up here, with a doctor and a nurse in my face making sure I was breathing.
> 
> They call it a “blast injury,” though it’s something they don’t really tell us about in our basic training classes. Doc talk, I guess. Apparently if you’re close enough to an explosion sometimes you don’t get cut up or bleed or fucking anything, but your insides can get injured, or rupture, and kill you from the inside out. The ears go first--it’s why I couldn’t hear for a good few minutes--and sometimes the lungs and even your guts get damaged and you don’t know about it for days, until they just bust right inside you, and then you’re pretty much a goner.
> 
> I don’t know about you, Andy, but I am not going to die because my fucking shit tubes blow up inside me.
> 
> Good thing Dave and the rest of the unit got me to this hospital, or else I’d still be walking around, minding my own business, and I could just drop dead at any moment without anyone knowing why. The doctors here say they get wind of a lot of those cases, guys who think they’re fine, they got blasted but they got lucky, and then boom, just dropping one day, waking up, getting off the shitter. But me, I’m the actual lucky one, because my guys got me in here quick, and now they can monitor me for a few days to make sure none of that happens.
> 
> I keep telling them, all I feel’s a little light-headed and sore on my ass from when I landed on it from the blast, but they’re keeping me here for observation anyway. And that’s just fucking fine with me, any time I stay out of the fields and in this hospital is a good time, that’s for damn sure. I get a bed--not a real bed, some rigged-up gurney they make for the casualties, but it’s better than a cot and way fucking better than a foxhole in the ground--and three square meals a day, even if they’re still C-rations. But most of all I just get to sit here, not go out into the field, not get worried about being shot at or shooting someone else.
> 
> The next few days are gonna be fucking heaven.
> 
> The doctors here are all treating me fine--well, treating me as good as they can in this hospital, I mean, because it’s really not very easy for them to treat anyone, let alone treat them nicely. Man, I never thought any group of people could hate their lot in this war worse than the grunts--well, I guess the Vietnamese villagers that just get caught in the middle of this, but in a lot of ways they don’t count. But the doctors here go through all the fear that soldiers have, they get bombed all the time and have to put up with the heat and the disease, too. And on top of that, we’re here, essentially, to kill people, to put it as bluntly as possible; the docs are here, it’s their very nature really, to save people. And, as they tell me, they don’t get a whole fucking lot of chances to do it.
> 
> Mostly I’ve been talking to this one doctor in particular--Johns, though he tries to get his patients to call him Mike, but most soldiers got all that rank rhetoric shit drilled so far into their brains they refuse to use anything more familiar than “Doc.” He’s been the one monitoring my case, and he says it’s been a pleasure, just ‘cause he knows checking up on my condition for five minutes means five minutes less of dealing with combat wounds and chemical burns; really terrible shit, and more than half of it he can’t do anything about. What’s interesting about the guy is he’s from Australia: the hospital’s run by an international aid organization, and they’ve got tons of docs and medical people from around the world here. A year ago I thought I’d never meet anybody outside of Oklahoma ever again; now I’m talking with people every day from halfway across the damn earth. Guess that’s one interesting thing to come out of this war.
> 
> And I’ve got this smokin’ hot nurse--jet-black hair, skin paler than mine, this lilting Irish accent all the sick grunts are falling for, though most of the time they only hear it when she’s barking orders or screeching at them for flirting. Nurse Hennessey doesn’t take shit from any of the G.I.s in her care and she makes sure they know it; some say she’s got a fiancee back in Ireland, others that she fell for a Marine from California and he’d destroy whatever soldier stole her away. I think she’s got a thing going on the side with Johns, the way they always seem to check up on my status at the same time, the way they end up lookin’ at each other more than me, but hey, you didn’t hear it from me.
> 
> She’s got a soft spot for yours truly, though; I think it’s all the ink, she always asks me about the different ones, where I got them, telling me to make sure I don’t mess them up by getting them blown to bits. Hard-ass Nurse Carly keeps herself buttoned up pretty good when she’s on the job, but underneath those nurse whites, I’m betting she’s got a few tats of her own.
> 
> It also might be because my closest friend here’s become their closest friend, too: Dave’s been visiting every chance he could get, and he’s gotten along real well with Mike and Carly, making sure I’m getting the best care the Red Cross can manage. (He’s a really good guy to have in your corner, and not just for the corny jokes and to make you look good. I really hope you get to meet him, Andy.) Dave says he’s just looking for any excuse to get away from combat for a little while, so he comes to visit, keep me company, but I think it’s a little more than that. He’s buddies with nearly everybody in camp, but if I’m not there, the fucker still gets lonely.
> 
> I’ve got real mixed feelings being in here, and it’s not just ‘cause it fucking sucks to get a blast injury and not even have some scars to show for it. I’m feeling fine, really, and I’m just waiting for Johns to give me a clean bill of health so I can get out of here and back to where I belong. But sitting on my ass all day I’ve seen a lot; more than what goes on in the field, in the jungles, ‘cause most of the time you’re just walking around blindly and not finding much of anything. But the hospital’s full of all the casualties, all these soldiers who got hurt and got caught unlucky out there: bleeding and screaming, some of them with limbs gone, some of them crying on the operating tables with their guts spilling out of their fatigues. Some of them not crying at all, and that’s when you realize they’ve bedded a dead guy next to you for the past twenty minutes, and the nurses are all too busy to notice.
> 
> It’s humbling...fuck, “humbling” isn’t even the word for it. I look around this hospital and thank the fucking stars I got through this war without a scratch. I know it’s not the stars, or God, or fate or whatever you want to call it keeping me alive, and making others dead. I don’t know what it is, really, but I’m glad I’m in here for nothing serious.
> 
> And it isn’t serious, Andy--remember that. I got shell-shocked for a little bit at first, my ears hurt like a bitch, and apparently I blacked out and don’t remember shit, but other than that, I’m feeling fine. I’m fine, and I’ll be back in the field before you know it--and I’ll be back home before you know it, too. So don’t start freaking out or thinking I’m on death’s door or anything. And you know I’m not lying, because we talked about it, and I promised, I won’t lie to you again. You’re the one person I can send the truth to in that whole state, probably even the country. You’ll be seeing my sorry face sooner than you know it, Skib.
> 
> ….well, fuck. I knew you were going to freak anyway.
> 
> Neal

***  


“Cold feet?”

Startled out of his daze, Andy looked up, surprised to find Mr. Anderson standing in front of him, quickly stepping out of Andy’s path numbly walking through the school corridor. He blinked, barely registering the question, his mind stubbornly refusing to focus on normalcy ever since Neal’s letter ended up in his hands. “Wha--”

“The meeting yesterday,” Anderson clarified. “Took a quick headcount and didn’t see you there--not even next to the pizza boxes.”

The _meeting_...it had been wiped from Andy’s mind once he had read of Neal’s blast injury, his emotions overpowering any sense of obligation he had about attending. He had holed himself up in his room the entire night, avoiding speaking even to his parents about his change in mood, and never even considered making the meeting. All he could think about during his sleepless night and all through the morning was how Neal had a penchant for downplaying his wounds, pretending pain rolled off his back like rainwater. If he wasn’t telling Andy the whole story...if Neal  was one of those dire cases he witnessed in the hospital, so help him...

Anderson continued, not noticing Andy’s mind was focused on something else. “I know you weren’t too keen on going in the first place, so I thought maybe you got cold feet.”

When Andy looked up again, his eyes were open wide, revealing his vulnerability. Ever since that first detention the history teacher had been nothing but helpful to Andy, understanding his worries with Neal, his issues over the war in general, placing his thoughts in perspective; letting him know that in his fears he wasn’t alone. He deserved to know Andy’s absence was due to more than just cold feet; and what’s more, Andy needed someone to talk to, or else all this worry was going to make him burst.

Around them the dull buzz of student activity was growing, the school hallways getting more crowded with the ring of the lunch bell. Andy looked at the teacher with sympathetic eyes; he couldn’t tell him in a throng of busy people, a clogged corridor of his peers who wouldn’t understand.

“Is there anywhere we can talk about this?” he asked; he supposed his voice sounded a little desperate, though he wasn’t trying to be, because in three minutes’ time they were in an empty history classroom with no one left to disturb them, Andy revealing what he found in the letter, and the fears he found in himself after reading it.

“I just...wasn’t in the right head to go, to talk about the war,” he explained after giving his apology; Anderson accepted it immediately, not realizing his reason would be so serious. He just assumed Andy had found something more interesting to watch on television. “Especially if anyone started talking shi-- _stuff_ \--” he quickly corrected himself, “--about the soldiers. I...” he was at a loss for the words to describe the rage he would have felt, the betrayal. ”I wouldn’t be able to just walk out, that’s for sure.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Anderson conceded. “I would really never hear the end of it from the school board if I invited one of their students into a fistfight.” Andy gave a small yet accepting smile, thankful he could find someone he could talk about his troubles to, maybe someone with a few answers and not just a sympathetic ear.

But still the teacher would not allow the subject to pass; he found a keeper in this one, someone who’d really stand up for what he believed in. Andy’s best friend wasn’t the only one ready for a fight. “I still think you’d really appreciate the meetings; I went there myself yesterday, there wasn’t any badmouthing soldiers, none of that. The students, they know the real fight is with the government sending those soldiers out there, putting them in danger.” He watched Andy’s eyes cloud over and fall to the floor, the thoughts in the teenager’s head returning to a man half a world away. “Getting them hurt.”

There was silence in the classroom for a moment, Andy sitting atop a student’s desk, leg up, chin resting on his knee in a quiet contemplation. It had felt good to get out his feelings about Neal’s hospitalization; fuck, it felt a hell of a lot better than bottling it up, keeping it his own to drive him crazy from the inside out over worry. If he did it more often--if he found others that felt the same way about the soldiers, about ending the war--maybe he wouldn’t feel so alone while Neal wasn’t here.

When he looked up again his eyes were full of sincerity, his words more honest than he had ever let himself be before. “I just want him to come home.”

With a large, humbling smile, Anderson rose from his desk and slapped a hand across Andy’s shoulders. “That’s what we’re all aiming for,” he said, happy to see Andy’s face break out into a smile.

“Why are you aiming for it, though?” Andy’s curiosity got the better of him, the question hanging in the air alongside the laminated posters of the presidents lining the classroom walls. The teacher was young but not young enough to get swept into the draft: he came into Tulsa with no wife, no children, just a steamer trunk of clothes and a briefcase full of lesson plans. He didn’t wear his hair long; he was never without a suit shirt and tie, though he ruffled administration feathers on occasion by opting for a black vest instead of a jacket. Andy was sure the man was no hippie, no stereotypical peacenik. Apart from the flimsy excuse he gave before of not wishing to see his students shipped off to Vietnam, Anderson’s reasons for opposing the war were a mystery.

The teacher stood up a little straighter, grinned a little wider; Andy could have sworn he heard his heels click together as he stood at attention. “Army 10th Special Forces Airborne,” he announced, much to Andy’s surprise. With a little wink he added, “Honorably discharged, of course.”

“You’re shitting me,” Andy said incredulously, momentarily forgetting his place; he slapped a hand over his mouth and apologized quickly for the language--which was rather ineffective to do both at once--but Anderson paid no mind.

He nodded. “Saw combat in Korea; fought with the 31st in the Battle of Pork Chop Hill.” He gave out a deep belly laugh at the name, just as he had the first day he heard it, thinking the general must have been out of his mind hungry when he came up with that one. “Was a part of the Operation Old Baldy; guess it’s pretty appropriate now, eh?” He rubbed a hand over the top of his head; none of the students ever concluded if Anderson went bald or if he did it to himself in some deranged crew-cut accident.

The realization dawned on Andy: he had never expected to encounter a veteran involved in protests against the war, let alone one standing in front of his history class, _teaching_ it when he had just _lived_ it. Anderson had enlisted in order to pay for college, he told him, but was sent off to Inchon and got more of an education in the Korean hills than he ever did in a classroom. But the training, the combat...being far off in a foreign land, away from everything you knew, with the threat of kill or be killed breathing down your neck at every turn and just wishing you could be  home...

Andy spoke the words before he thought them. “You know.”

With a solemn nod Anderson agreed. “I know.” Quickly the moment was broken with the droning ring of the bell, signaling the end of the lunch period. “And I know _that_ sound means you’ve got to get to your next class.”

Students would be streaming into the class at any moment, but Andy had already shared all that he could muster. He made no promises about the next meeting but took down the information, hoping that, barring another terrible letter, he’d make it there this time. As he opened the door to head towards his physics class, Andy shot one last grateful smile at the history teacher. “Thanks, Mr. Anderson,” he said. “I think...I really needed to talk. So thanks for listening.”

He got another wave of dismissal in return. “Just glad I could help. And you’re not my student anymore; you can keep up the appearances on school grounds, but if you call me ‘Mr. Anderson’ I’ll feel like an old man.” He gave a big grin as the first of his students started filing into their seats. “You can call me Monty.”


	8. Chapter 8

Batting heavy eyelids open, Neal awoke to the sight of hazel gray eyes staring back at him and a soldier far too complacent with invading his personal space.

“Wake up, Sleepy Jean,” David joked, poking a finger at the broad of Neal’s forehead. Neal groaned, and wondered if he could attempt to bar visitors from the field hospital if he asked Nurse Hennessey real nicely.

“Stop fucking with the sick, Cook,” he complained, draping an arm over his eyes to block out the morning sun.

For his avoidance Neal received a playful punch on his shoulder from the visitor, who held little sympathy towards a man who got to sleep in a bed last night instead of the red clay ground. “I will when I _find_ someone who’s sick,” David countered. Another slap landed on Neal’s chest; when he peered down from underneath his arm he found a small pile of letters resting there. “Special delivery,” he announced, and despite the rude awakening, Neal felt obliged to give his friend a smile of gratitude.

One package--wrapped in brown canvas paper, scrawled in a barely-legible handwriting that must have been genetic--and a heavily-padded letter were soon spread out on the hospital bed, Neal’s eyes locked on both of them like reuniting with an old friend. He opened the package first, knowing what lay in wait for him inside: a carton of Texas’s finest cigarettes, pristine, so new they were gleaming in their cardboard box. Neal grinned like a boy scout opening up care packages sent to him in summer camp. “Dear old Dad,” he mused, patting the carton and keeping it close to him.

“I better not be hearing you’re getting _family_ members now to help indulge you in your habit,” a voice called out, clear and playfully stern, above the noise of the field hospital. Smiling, Neal took hold of the carton and held it close to his heart, lest his approaching doctor try to take it away from him, in the name of his good health. No matter how often Michael Johns warned Neal of the damages of smoking, it wasn’t a vice the soldier was willing to give up any time soon.

Defiantly Neal pulled a pack from the bunch, expertly sliding a cigarette between his lips. “Get off my case, Johns,” he toyed, the Zippo lighter poised in his hands. He had gone for weeks with only the rationed smokes given to him by the army--no-name, bland cigarettes only good for revealing your location to the VietCong at night. Damn, he wanted to savor these as much as the other letter addressed to him, still laying unopened in his lap. “There’s nothing wrong with a good, clean smoke. Fuck, the government even gives them to us like they’re candy.”

Johns rolled his eyes once he reached his patient’s bedside. “Yes, because your government _always_ has your best health interests in mind.” His wit was cynical, albeit accurate. “Tell me again about their infinite compassion when they sent you out to this hell.”

Having no appropriate comeback, Neal clenched his jaw around the cigarette at his lips and silently lit the end, making a rather showy production of blowing the first inhalation back in Michael’s face. He further ignored the doctor by taking a look at the rest of his mail David had delivered, a bulky, padded envelope with familiar writing scrawled on the front. Neal’s lips curved into a smile around the cigarette; photographs, he thought to himself with unfiltered glee, and tore open the letter.

“Look,” Johns tried to regain his patient’s attention, pointing to his visitor who waited calmly with letters of his own. “Your boyfriend here’s taken my advice. Haven’t seen him touch a stick of that stuff since you’ve been here.”

Neal looked up from the letter, somewhat startled--he hadn’t been paying attention to Michael’s lecture, not when Andy was so amusingly trying to yell at him through paper for getting injured, half the pages filled with curses that put sailors’ mouths to shame. “What? Boyfriend?” His eyes caught sight of David, who was grinning and rolling his eyes. Neal dismissed the banter quickly; he had to get back to his letter. “Dave’s not my boyfriend.”

Above the dull buzz of the hospital David’s voice rose like a sunny, boisterous beacon, a light tone that should have been reserved for peacetime. “Ah, wrong; I’m _your_ boyfriend, Johns,” he joked, pointing a finger straight back at the doctor, reveling in the slightly bemused expression on Michael’s face. “To Neal here, I’m just the postman.”

“Postman ain’t ever this talkative,” Neal mumbled, shooting David a smile over his papers.

Johns smiled, watching the two friends lob retorts back at one another, David peeking over the edge of Neal’s papers to see that it was sheet music, not photographs, that enthralled Neal so. “So _that’s_ the reason you’re always here when I’m checking up on your mate,” he teased. David certainly wore out visitation rights since Neal arrived in the field hospital, stopping by every day despite their unit’s relief camp stationed miles away.

David’s smile went crooked as he winked at the doctor, his sense of humor as virile as ever. “Don’t flatter yourself too much there, Aussie,” he said. “Like every other poor sap here, my heart’s been stolen by Nurse Carly.”

“That’s Nurse _Hennessey_ to you,” came a voice floating above the noise, David’s playful jest met with an immovable wall of nurse’s whites, as impeccably bleached as the Vietnam laundries would accommodate. Carly’s fair complexion held a pleasant, though weary, smile as she approached the bed with military-grade medical instruments in hand. She narrowed her eyes at David, trying to be as authoritative as possible; normally she could frighten even the hardiest soldier into submission, but David Cook knew better than to be scared by an Irish lass’s tongue. “And it’s the soldiers’ own faults, falling for the first woman they’ve seen since saying goodbye to Mama in the States. I’ve been stealing no hearts on this base, you know that.”

Sagely David nodded, pretending to be chastised, but he couldn’t help snatching a look in Michael’s direction, who, at Carly’s insistence of romantic innocence, distractedly buried his nose in Neal’s chart.

Turning her attentions back to her duties, Carly slapped a hand down on Neal’s shoulder, giving him a wry smile. “You know what I’m here for,” she said, brandishing a syringe. “Now show me that ink, soldier.”

Neal groaned, reluctantly holding out his tattooed arm for Carly’s inspection. “You’re a fucking vampire, Carly,” he complained as she drew his blood for observation. With his other arm he held Andy’s letter far away from Carly’s ministrations, ensuring the new song he had penned--independently, without so much as a note of help from Neal--remained untarnished and bloodless.

“Last one,” she promised, while Johns busied himself by monitoring Neal’s vitals. “And after this, Tiemann, I hope I’ll never see your sorry face again.” She metered the remark with a wink; never seeing Neal again meant he’d never see the inside of a field hospital again, and all the more chance he’d get out of this war still standing. “It’ll be bittersweet, of course.”

“Kept you here as long as I could,” the doctor explained, almost apologetically. There were so many men and boys he could not save, and even when he did, it was merely to send them back out into the jungles to undo all that he could repair. If he could keep even one soldier in his sickbed, for as long as Neal’s government would allow him, Michael was going to milk that power for all it was worth. “But you’ve checked out fine, your vitals are all normal. You’d probably be healthier than me, if you didn’t keep those around.” He pointed once again at Neal’s carton of cigarettes, which prompted Neal to cradle them to his chest like an infant. “You should be put back into active duty straightaway...unless you lose an arm in the next fifteen minutes, you’ve got no reason to crowd up one of my beds any longer.”

“Carly keeps sticking me with that needle and the arm’ll just fall off,” he grumbled, and received a pinch from the nurse in retaliation.

“And he won’t be going back into active duty,” David spoke up, and soon three pairs of eyes were on him, a shock for everyone around Neal’s bedside, including Neal.

Well, that certainly brought all the attention back to him. With a satisfied smile David pulled out the remaining papers he held with him--penned by typewriter and not by hand, and not all addressed to David. “Once you were under the care of the good doctor here,” he nodded towards Johns, “I took the liberty of requesting some time off, in case you didn’t make it and I had to go drown my sorrows.” He grinned wide as he presented one of the letters to Neal, watching as his eyes lit up while scanning the page. “A lot of time off.”

“The requests went through?” Neal needn’t have asked, he could see the approval written down in black and white right on the paper, but he needed that final confirmation, the nod of David’s head that couldn’t help but be followed by a giddy smile. “Dave, I could _kiss_ you for this.”

“Thought you said I wasn’t your boyfriend.”

Carly leaned over the head of the hospital bed, reading over Neal’s shoulder. “You re-upped then, eh?” she asked. “Reenlisting, the both of you.”

“Really, now.” Michael’s tone was harsh, directed at the two men. “That’s six more months of dodging land mines and getting lucky, Tiemann,” he warned.

“But for now,” David reminded him, reaching over to playfully tap the doctor’s shoulder with his letter. “It means a full month away from it, too.” Even Johns had to concede that the benefit was incredibly tempting, almost impossible to resist, and when they had found out about the free leave program, both Neal and David willfully succumbed. “Thirty days, anywhere in the world, all on Uncle Sam’s dime.”

“Figure they’ve got us by the balls anyway,” Neal chimed in, “Might as well make them pay for the handling fees.”

Though he clearly disapproved of spending any time longer than legally obligated in a war zone, Johns reluctantly perked up at the fringe benefits of the pair’s reenlistment. “Anywhere in the world?” He clapped his hands together dramatically and rubbed them together, as if hatching a plot. “So, where’s it going to be, mates? London? Paris?”

With shrugs and humble smiles, almost if they has coordinated their responses, David and Neal smiled politely at the scheming doctor and both replied, “Home.”

Pulling a face, it was certainly clear that Johns wasn’t in agreement with their answer. “ _Home??_ ” he said, as if David and Neal had suggested they’d be spending their month’s leave in Antarctica. “When you’ve got anywhere in the world to choose from?”

David seemed unfazed by the line of questioning; he had already made his mind up long before their approvals had come in the mail. “But there’s no place in the world I’d rather be.” A strangely sweet smile played on his lips, his thoughts drifting to a faraway town so different from the lands they traveled today. “It’ll be December by the time we get our boots on; Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays. Instead of spending all those holidays buried in some foxhole in a swamp, I’d much rather spend them with people I care about.” He placed his hand on Neal’s shoulder as he shot a wink across the hospital bed. “Present company excluded, of course.”

“I feel honored, mama’s boy,” Neal muttered underneath a smirk.

“You’re damn right I’m a mama’s boy,” David took pride in the name. “Call me anything you want, as long as there’s a home-cooked meal and my own bed waiting for me at the end of the day. Can’t wait to see her again, and my brothers.”

Johns rolled his eyes again. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be spending my free ride just on family, Dave.”

David’s demeanor grew reserved; he gave the doctor a small, resigned smile, and his eyes narrowed as if he were staring into the sun. “I just...I’ve got to see my brothers,” David said. Neal knew the signs, could have almost predicted when David’s nose scrunched up, willing himself not to cry, but, like a good man and a good friend, did not say a word.

Neal felt a poke at his side: Carly was nudging him good-naturedly, a wry smile on her lips. “You don’t seem a family man like Cook to me,” she observed. “What’s in it for you?”

He hesitated, reluctant to speak the first things that came to his mind, the thoughts that brought an irrepressible smile to Neal’s face, and a tighter grip on the letters in his hand. There were so many reasons to return to Tulsa: breathe the clean, cold December air back into his lungs, feel the weight of a guitar in his arms once more. But the one that stuck in his head--the reason his heart beat a little faster over David’s news and his fingers nervously tangled themselves into the bedsheets--was right there in his letter, in the words of encouragement to get better and the scathing warnings that Neal should never scare him like that again. It was in the sheet music he held, brand new to his eyes and ears, that spoke more than any prose could give him.

 

_Come back for another day with me_  
 _Come back, you’ll never want to leave_  


 

“...Cheeseburgers,” he said instead, nodding his head enthusiastically to ensure that his audience believed him. “And wings, definitely, smothered in hot sauce. And some good ol’ Texas barbecue, think that’d let me die happy.”

He gave a toothy, hopefully convincing grin as Carly laughed and rolled her eyes. “Predictable,” she said, and silently Neal sighed, relieved he would not have to delve further into his intentions. “Never get between a man and his meat.”

“You’re wasting a perfect opportunity, you two,” a skeptical Johns insisted, shaking his head. “Soldiers, young, with scars to show for your trouble...any girl around the damn globe’d fall for that package, at least for the month’s worth of your time.” His mouth curved into a sly smile; if he had the same offer handed to him, he certainly wouldn’t be going back _home_ with it. “If it were me, I’d be heading to Madrid. I hear those Spanish girls  love a G.I.’s war stories...if you know what I mean. I could get some good...hospitality over there, I’ll bet.”

He waggled his eyebrows dramatically, causing David to laugh. And while Neal chuckled along with the rest of them, he knew without a doubt that the physical pleasures of a European fling wouldn’t compare to the emotional, creative comfort of being back in Tulsa...and, maybe, the physical pleasures there, too. But the loudest laugh of all came from the hard-edged nurse, whose voice rose above the soldiers as she threw her head back and cackled.

“It’s not _that_ funny,” Michael said as an aside while Carly documented Neal’s vitals on his chart, happily smiling to herself.

“Oh, no,” she corrected him. When her gaze met his, her eyes were small, menacing slits, deadly dangerous. A soldier was no longer afraid of the Viet Cong if they looked into Carly Hennessey’s challenging eyes and felt the true meaning of fear. “It’s right hilarious that you think you’re going to get much of anything in the near future.”

Before Michael could formulate a retort she was off, throwing a vengeful yet satisfied smirk in his direction. With cheeks blazing scarlet Doctor Johns quickly excused himself, muttering that he had other patients to attend to, and made a very grand effort to show he was certainly not following her. Neal laughed at the scene, his first genuine laugh since David came into the hospital that day, and remarked on how clueless those two seemed to be about how obvious they were.

“I don’t know,” David said warily, sitting down at the corner of Neal’s bed, watching the medical team’s retreating, squabbling frames. “Probably just as obvious as your bullshit reasons for going home.”

Startled, Neal opened his mouth to yell at David for thinking he knew what was going on in his fucking head; for calling him out on his lie. But David held a hand up, stopping Neal’s response before it started. “Wings, Neal?” He shook his head. “That’s your reason? No one loves wings that fucking much.”

“You’d be surprised,” Neal mumbled, but David went on.

“There’s no reason to bullshit with me,” he assured Neal, giving him a friendly smile. He noticed how Neal’s fingers fiddled with the sheets, how his eyes were down, looking somewhere deep in his mind, the glimpses of an excited smile coming through in brief moments. David had a pretty good idea why Neal was so eager to return home. “Can’t wait to get your hands on that guitar again, huh.”

David knew him all too well. “It’s been months,” he said, thinking of the nights he spent in-country with only memories of the strings against his fingers, the familiar warm wood in his hands. “Might’ve gotten rusty. Hell, maybe I’ve even forgotten how to play.”

“You?” David scoffed, coaxing out a teasing smile from Neal. “Man, you breathe music. I don’t know anyone in the world who flat-out loves it more than you.”

He did miss the guitar, that was certain, and he missed the power that came with it, the ability to create and move people with only a song, to carve sound out of a space where only silence lived. But it was more than his own personal desires: Neal wanted to hear the songs he had been writing in Vietnam, play them for the first time, and alongside the man who helped him write them, the voice that would make Neal’s music complete. The man taking precious care of the very guitar Neal ached to play.

Neal told his friend all of this--though, admittedly, he left out the parts about _aching_ and _desire_ , he didn’t want Dave to get the wrong idea--and watched the smile spread across David’s face that he knew mirrored his own. “Playing my songs--playing our songs,” he quickly corrected himself, “Just...playing music with him, Dave. Being with Andy. It’s gonna make this whole fucking war worth it. Every second.”

***  


“I swear, if I have to be here for one more second I’m gonna put a damn bullet in my brain.”

Jennie clucked her tongue disapprovingly at her escort as they slowly swayed to the beat of a Donovan song--one of the many contributing factors to Andy’s suddenly suicidal thoughts. “You can’t shoot yourself here,” she said matter-of factly. “You don’t have a gun.”

Andy’s eyes rolled to the ceiling, catching sight of the colorful streamers and balloons decorating the Central High School gym, sagging low like jungle vines. “We’re in Oklahoma, Jennie. I’m pretty sure I could get myself one if I really wanted.”

She waved off his concerns yet again, pulling her arms draped around his neck a little tighter as they slow danced, pinching the skin at the nape between her fingers. “But if you did blow your brains out,” she reasoned, in a level, even friendly tone. “You’d get blood and brains on my dress. And then I’d have to find a way to bring you back to life, so I could kill you all over again.”

That finally coaxed a smile out of Andy, a chuckle; the laugh came so loud and so suddenly to him that the sound bounced off the gym’s concrete walls and startled some members of the crowd, including his dance partner. He quickly mumbled an apology to Jennie, though it didn’t stop the roving, judgmental eyes of the partygoers from training themselves on the pair--the exact reason why Jennie had invited him in the first place.

“Sorry,” he said again, face reddening, his necktie suddenly feeling too tight--as if it weren’t tight enough already, he fucking hated this monkey suit he had to wear--as he heard whispers starting to circulate on the outskirts of the dance floor.

But Jennie wasn’t accepting any more apologies from Andy, short of begging her forgiveness should he actually shoot himself. “I should be apologizing to you,” she said, shaking her head. Either she was oblivious to her former classmates’ stares, Andy surmised, or she was doing a hell of a job ignoring them. Fuck, if she was this confident, maybe she didn’t have to bring him in the first place. “I know this isn’t really your scene.”

“So far from my scene it’s in an entirely different script,” he said, and received another pinch for good measure.

“Which is why,” Jennie continued, “I’m thankful that you came with me.” She gave him a genuine smile, one that, despite his discomfort in a suit and the bad music afflicting his eardrums, Andy couldn’t help but return.

She had approached him a week ago, while the shock of Neal’s injury was still fresh, taking his mind off his worries with an unlikely invitation. Ordered months before she had even graduated, Jennie had two tickets to Central High School’s homecoming dance--one for her, she explained, and one for her boyfriend, who, currently residing in a Vietnamese jungle, could not RSVP. She wanted to go but was wary of attending alone; seeing her old classmates for the first time since graduation--since her boyfriend was deployed--wasn’t something she braved handling alone.

In came Andy Skib to the rescue, in an ill-fitting suit borrowed from his father, a last-minute store-bought corsage, and his date having to be her own chauffeur. Although they both knew Andy would be a poor substitute, it was the least he could do for a friend, and he knew that, if Jennie knew how to play a guitar, she’d do the same for him.

“Well,” he reasoned, as the song faded out to its end, and a more upbeat Herman’s Hermits song began to play. Holy fuck, Andy’s thoughts raged, he was in mediocre music hell. “There’s free punch and cake. I’m not going to turn down free punch and cake.”

Jennie rolled her eyes, pulling away from their perfunctory dance position--her arms around his neck, his hands loosely and politely on her waist, ever the gentleman--and dragging Andy off the dance floor. “I swear, you’d follow the devil down into Hell if he promised you there’d be free food there,” she joked.

Andy flashed a grin, eager to get away from the awkward two-step drone of slow dancing. “If Satan don’t play Donovan down there, I’m all for it.”

After the dancing there were couples’ portraits, where Andy managed a tight-lipped smile and Jennie, in retaliation against the photographer who insisted the pair pose like a couple, stuck her tongue out while flashing the camera a peace sign. Then came friends’ introductions, Andy meeting old schoolmates of Jennie, and excusing himself once they began to reminisce in order to gorge himself on refreshments. By the time the self-congratulatory speeches began--teachers and student council members extolling the triumphs of the school’s football teams of yesteryear, ignoring the fact that many of those players were dead or on their way there--Andy felt he may not even need a gun, he could jam some of the party’s plastic cutlery into his brain stem and be done with it.

“You’re behaving,” Jennie observed as the principal showered honors upon the returned athletes of Jennie’s graduated class. The labored groan that came from Andy’s lips was drowned out by the eruption of applause at the former quarterback’s speech, where he thanked his mother, God, and Governor Dewey Bartlett.

The music kicked up again through the gym’s speakers as the speeches dwindled down to a close. Jennie frowned at the selection of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and poked her escort, who was halfway slipping into unconsciousness. “Come on, Andy,” she said. “I think I’m ready to go.”

Poking his head up, Andy looked around groggily, noticing that the rest of the dance seemed to still be in full swing--albeit, whatever counted for “full swing” with the music they were playing. “But your party’s not over,” he said; a weak protest, but he didn’t want Jennie to leave on his account.

Jennie smiled sweetly. “I’ll live,” she said. Reaching into her bag, she dangled her keys in front of Andy’s face, the clanging of the metal jarring him alert. “Besides, the cake’s all gone, and looks like I’ve got to get you home by your bedtime.”

Taking his lumps as the perennial youngster in his group of friends, Andy grinned, and made a futile attempt to snatch the keys from Jennie’s hand and take off with her car. They rode on to the much more pleasing sounds of the Stones coming from Jennie’s radio, proving that at least some adult in Oklahoma understood what kind of music “the kids” were truly into these days.

A kid, Andy reflected on his thoughts, as Jennie pulled into the Skibs’ driveway and ushered him out of the car. That’s what the night had made him feel like: just two teenagers attending a dance, the cares of their world melting away with party decorations and slow dances; laughing, living. Not thinking about the troubles that lay ahead, the emotions that waged inside both of them left at the gymnasium door.

Jennie, with a slightly guilty look on her face, revealed that was a bit of her intention all along. “You’ve just been so down lately, ever since you got that letter about Neal in the hospital.” He had gotten others since then, mostly laughing in the way Neal’s words only could about Andy freaking out over some damn shell shock. But the thoughts still remained, worries hanging over him like a dense fog, that until Neal came back he would never be safe, and Andy would always fear the next letter may be the last. “It’s why I asked you here; I wanted to cheer you up a bit. Take your mind off worrying, even for a little while.”

He gave her a polite smile: thin-lipped and half-hearted, his dimples hidden unlike a genuine smile. Neal would have known what that smile meant if he were there to see it. “I appreciate it; really, I do,” he said. He shook his head. “But...I don’t think I want to forget.” He poked Jennie in the side when a peculiar smile formed on her face, giving no explanation to her thoughts. “The important thing is that _you_ had fun. It was _your_ homecoming, after all.”

“I did,” she said automatically, but then stopped herself, and laughed. “Actually, no--if I’m telling the truth? It was awful.” Andy laughed, sudden and hearty and nearly doubled over, his eyes pinched shut from the effort. That was what Jennie had wanted to see from her troubled friend. “It was boring, and bland, and once I got there I realized all those people I knew in high school, the ones I worried what they might say if I showed up alone...I don’t really care what they have to say, anymore. I guess I just wanted to go, because...” Jennie’s gaze dropped to the ground as she tried to find the words, wrapping her jacket tighter around herself, as if shielding from a sudden chill.

Andy reached out and placed a comforting hand on Jennie’s shoulder, then the other, until he pulled her in for a hug. He already knew the words she wanted to say, but couldn’t. “...Because he would have wanted to go,” he supplied.

“I miss him,” she said into Andy’s suit jacket.

“I know.”

They stayed there for a while, until the early November cold really did bring Jennie to shivers, and she stepped back. Explaining she had the drive back to her Oklahoma City dorm room in the morning, she moved to return to her car, but Andy stopped her, offering her one parting, warm smile. “Hey,” he said, with deep sincerity in his voice. “I hope your man comes home to you soon.”

That strange smile Andy had spied on Jennie’s face returned for a moment, her eyes sparking something amusing and mysterious, as if she finally deciphered a riddle told to her long ago. “Thanks, Andy,” she said, coming in close again for a grateful goodbye. Rising up on the toes of her pumps, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, and a squeeze of his hand. She wasn’t the only one missing someone abroad. “I hope your man comes home to you, too.”

The hand in hers went limp, and Andy’s mouth opened to protest, but by the time he could think of some feeble excuse Jennie was already at her car, waving goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics are from the To Have Heroes song "Reasons" from the eponymous EP.


	9. Chapter 9

Andy had a month to let Jennie’s words sink in, to hear the amused insistence in her voice when he phoned her every so often that she wasn’t explaining a word of it, he’d have to figure it out himself. This was no Agatha Christie novel, he’d protest, growing more irritated as Jennie giggled over the telephone, holding in a secret; he didn’t want some big reveal, he just wanted the truth. Jennie would, as always, stress she wasn’t playing games with him, this was much easier than investigating a murder or even reading about one. If Andy put down the damn guitar for five minutes, she said, he might understand it one day.

That understanding came a few weeks after the dance that had left Andy sure that he’d never attend another in his lifetime. His birthday came and went with little fanfare, his seventeenth barely indistinguishable from his sixteenth’s celebrations, except for the glaring fact that Neal was nowhere to be found. Although his parents bought him a cake, and Nick bought him a bottle of whiskey, Andy felt there wasn’t much to celebrate in his seventeenth year; it was simply another reminder of getting closer to eighteen, closer to the time the government could grip its fatigue-green claws into him and pull him into the draft.

But one particularly brisk November day Andy came home from school, greeted by his mother and a small package, his eyes lighting up at the now-familiar sight of foreign paper and military-grade ink. Nearly snatching it from his mother’s hands, Andy raced up the stairs to his bedroom, holing himself inside before tearing open the package.

A sheet of paper fluttered out towards the ground; Neal’s letter was shorter than usual, but upon inspecting it, Andy discovered it was just a short explanation, instructions for the rest of the package. His true letter was in the form of a cassette tape, thick and clumsy as it slid out of the envelope into Andy’s palm; Andy’s birthday gift. David had managed to smuggle away a tape recorder from one of the new recruits, and Neal thought it to be a perfect opportunity to send something in lieu of an actual present, something tangible and heavy Andy could hold; it would be better than nothing at all.

The audio tape was grainy, barely withstanding its journey, and a deep, irritating buzz permeated the recording, but Andy’s breath was stilled from the first moment he put it into the Skibs’ stereo system. From the first muttered curse at the bulky recorder from the start, to the soft, unfiltered laugh marking the tape’s end, it was clear to Andy’s ears that this was Neal, this was his voice, his words.

Andy listened to the cassette well into the night, memorizing every word, every tonal inflection, closing his eyes and picturing Neal recording it half a world away. It was only because his parents shooed him to bed that he ever turned it off; had it been his choice, Andy would have picked sound over sleep any day.

Every day after school Andy would make a direct line for home, as eager to listen as if it were the first time the tape rolled through his stereo. Perched in an armchair by the console, eyes closed, lips moving to the dictation, headphones strapped onto his ears so often one would think they were permanently glued on, Andy spent most of November keeping this one piece of Neal as close to him as his guitar. The words from Jennie that he had dwelled upon before were drowned out by Neal’s, informing Andy of his plans to come back to Tulsa for a visit, explaining with weary, needy sighs how much he wanted to come home.

The routine continued as November’s blustery fall turned into a cold, wintry December, with Andy rushing home every afternoon, to the cassette tape, and waiting for Neal’s return. His head down as he exited the school, mind focused only on one thing, Andy had not even noticed the presence of an extra Dodge Charger in the parking lot, its motor idling to keep away the cold, its owner leaning against its steel frame.

But he stopped short, nearly falling over his own feet, as he heard the Charger’s horn beeping at him, the familiar, impatient alarm bringing his memories back to another time, a simpler moment. He knew that horn well. Andy’s head immediately shot up, eyes darting around quickly, finally resting when he caught sight of the car in question, and the man driving it, arms crossed in front of his chest, a smirk playing on pierced lips.

He must have shouted, Andy thought of himself, a smile widening on his face, heart thundering in his ears. He felt like hollering to the skies, whooping and cheering until his throat turned dry and sore, crying out to the world that things were righting themselves again. With all that urge to call out something must have risen up his throat, at least a laugh, a single note of pleasure. From the distance between them he saw Neal jump the tiniest bit, startled, and then his grin widened as he dragged off a cigarette. He had made a sound, Andy supposed, and Neal had heard it; and, pleasantly surprised, he liked what he heard.

There were only fifty feet between them now, the distance between the sidewalk and the middle of the parking lot, and while it was quite different from being half a world away to Andy’s mind it was too far to bear. He broke into a run towards the Charger, getting closer to Neal, noticing the cropped haircut, the clean-shaven face that was so different from what he had left. There was something different in his body, too, muscles borne out of the necessity of a soldier, filling out his old denim jacket, his worn jeans tighter than usual. The piercings were replaced the minute he stepped off the army bus, the familiar plugs and rings at odds with the military-grade haircut that Neal’s wild, Irish hair would inevitably defy.

But his eyes...crystal blue, and squinting from a cold winter sun. They were exactly the same, bright and intelligent, scrutinizing Andy as he approached, twenty feet, fifteen, ten. Eyes that Andy remembered staring into his that morning in the treehouse, the moment before they kissed.

Holy fucking God, did Andy miss those eyes.

His feet stuttered to a stop a few paces from Neal, the momentum suddenly blown out of Andy’s sails, his thoughts jumbled on how he should proceed. He wanted to throw his arms around Neal, touch him, make sure he was real and standing right in front of him. But proper decorum told Andy to keep his distance, that the war may have changed his friend from some college dropout kid to a man, and men do not hug like it was their last day on Earth.

Andy shoved his hands awkwardly into his pockets, a blush creeping onto his cheeks, until he looked up and his gaze locked with Neal’s, warm and inviting and wondering why the fuck it was taking him so long. With a relieved sigh he threw himself into Neal’s arms, pulling him in for a tight hug, feeling skin and muscle and bone underneath fabric, his mind repeating over and over that it was _Neal_ and he was _here_ and he was _safe._

He felt Neal shudder, then the arms around him tighten and pull him in closer, and Neal sighed into Andy’s hair. They must have been quite the scene, Andy thought to himself, grown men embracing in a high school parking lot; he was surprised no one had told them to get a room yet. Then he felt the rumbling chuckle rise from Neal’s gut, and though he couldn’t see it from his position, he knew Neal was grinning.

“Thought you didn’t run.” Neal’s first words to his face since February, and Andy thought fleetingly about burning the cassette tape for being such a flimsy facsimile of the original.

“I don’t,” he argued into Neal’s ear, as he felt the other man’s shoulders began to shake with silent laughter. “I walk briskly.”

***

“When did you get back? How long was the flight? Are you here till New Year’s? Does it still--”

“Andy, Jesus,” Neal laughed, the barrage of questions from his friend assaulting him as soon as he got behind the Charger’s wheel. “For fuck’s sake, I just got home.”

Home...it had been such an abstract, faraway concept for Neal, for so long now, it was almost impossible to conceive that his boots really dug into Tulsa soil once more, that he wasn’t having a dream in the jungle, fueled by heat and fear. It had felt like it took no time at all to go from the hell he’d been living in for months back to the civilization he knew, despite the marathon flight, the bus ride from the air field, the silent drive back with his mother from the depot. Were it not for the roar of the engine as he turned the ignition, the crunch of the asphalt underneath his Charger’s tires, and the warm yet concrete feel of Andy’s welcome hug, Neal would have surely thought none of this was real.

He looked over to his passenger while maneuvering out of the parking lot: Andy’s eyes were wide and excited, he was nearly bouncing out of his seat. At one point Neal thought he would jump straight out the car roof, ejected on his own energy like one of those spy shows on television. His dress shirt and slacks were standard issue, the dress code of their private school since before they were gleams in their parents’ eyes; Neal thought it oddly depressing that he came all the way back from the fucking army and his best friend was dolled up in a different kind of uniform. But the moment they peeled out of the lot, the stifling necktie at Andy’s throat was unknotted and tossed in Neal’s backseat, the topmost buttons on his shirt loosed. Andy tilted his head back against the headrest and breathed a sigh of relief, eager to be free of the school’s constraints for the afternoon. Neal found himself so observant of his friend’s developments in the past year--subtle definition peeking through his low-buttoned shirt along with darkening wisps of chest hair, his delicate fingers so attuned to the piano now sporting the calluses of a guitarist--that he almost forgot to keep his eyes on the road.

Andy refused to let his questions fall by the wayside; he slapped the dashboard as he grinned, garnering a shout of disapproval from Neal, but gaining his attention nonetheless. “I just want to know things,” he said; he wanted their conversations to run on without end, the way pens and scraps of paper did not allow.

“You _already_ know everything,” Neal chuckled, his friend’s enthusiasm not lost on him. At a fork in the road Neal turned left instead of right, farther into the tree-lined sleepy streets surrounding the school’s campus and away from the highway that led to Andy’s front door. If Andy wanted to talk, Neal wouldn’t be the one to cut it short. “We’ve written letters all damn year, there’s fuck else to know about me that I didn’t put in writing to you.”

They passed the tennis courts, and the lonely baseball field, covered with tarp for the winter, wrapped up like a Christmas present. “Yeah, but...” he argued futilely, finding no convincing way to tell Neal he just wanted to hear the sound of his voice, listen to the genuine article recite the words he read all year. “I want to hear it from you. You’re here, I’m here.” He shrugged. “Pretend I haven’t read it before. Pretend I’m illiterate.”

“Whiny needy motherfucker,” Neal muttered with great affection, and Andy laughed. “You laugh, but you wouldn’t believe the morons they’ve got fighting over there. Can’t even write letters home. Dave ended up writing for most of them--” He stopped himself suddenly, realizing that was a story he had not shared, and remembered that wasn’t why David had sent all those letters at all.

But Andy hadn’t noticed; he picked up on the name, one that made an appearance at least once in every letter Neal sent, and amused himself with the improbable thought that he might have to fight for the role of Neal Tiemann’s best friend. “How is Dave?” he asked. “Back in the States, too, right?” Neal had given some information about the free leave in his audio message, but hadn’t the space on the tape to go into detail, much less talk about David’s own plans.

Neal nodded as the car sped past the athletic fields, a normally busy race track empty but for the cold. The road ended in a smaller asphalt lot behind the football field, desolate long after practice, the winter’s early sun beginning to dip low behind the bleachers. “He’s back at home, in Missouri. Said he didn’t want to see or hear one damn speck of me again till we got called back and he absolutely had to.”

He shrugged, giving Andy a sly grin, miming indifference. Andy matched the grin and tried not to notice the Charger rolling to a stop in a place that was very much not the Skibs’ driveway. “He’s missing out, then.”

Another shrug, and Neal killed the engine, his beauty slowing its humming down to a halt. “When he’s here, he wants to think of... _here_ ,” he explained. David hadn’t given Neal his reasons--though he talked Neal’s fucking ear off well enough on the plane ride home--but it was a sentiment Neal understood. “He doesn’t want to talk about all the shit that went on, and I get that. I feel the same way.”

Suddenly quite attentive, Andy sat up in the passenger seat, his earnestness changing, the questions ceased. “You don’t have to talk about that, if you don’t want,” he immediately conceded; Neal had to stop himself from smiling at the startlingly serious expression on Andy’s face. “We can do whatever you like.”

“Scared I’ll ditch you on the football field if you keep bitchin’?” he laughed, toothy and genuine, something he hadn’t remembered feeling since February.

Andy smiled softly. “Never.”

Laughing again, Neal slapped the steering wheel, amazed at how his mood had lightened over just the past twenty minutes. It was an awkward return to the country that sent him out to war, a silent, tense drive home where his mother no longer knew if she chauffeured her son or a soldier. But twenty minutes back in a car with Andy and their banter fit together like always, Neal’s nerves calm, his smile true. When he was with Andy, Neal felt like he never left.

“I missed this,” he said, looking out through his windshield onto the frozen field. “I missed...being here.” He waved Andy’s concerns away when he said he always thought Neal hated Tulsa, which was true, but fuck, he’d found a lot worse over the past few months that made him beg for the mundane Midwestern town again. “It’s not _here,_ here, that I miss; it’s...” he explained, motioning with his hands, trying to get his thoughts to match up with his mouth but failing. Andy waited, silent but listening, ever the patient friend.

Neal gave out a sigh and shook his head; here he was, trying to get his words out right, when he should have already known, as it always had been, when it came to Andy he didn’t have to try. “I missed the food, man. Burgers and shakes whenever the fuck you want them, real barbecue; shit that don’t come out of a tin can. I missed taking this baby out--” He smoothed his palms over the dashboard, lovingly apologizing for his absence. “And driving, wherever I wanna go...no one to tell me where I gotta fucking be. Just...going as far as the tank’ll take you.”

“And there’s the not getting shot at part,” Andy supplied, breaking Neal’s gaze out the window.

“That,” Neal agreed, chuckling. “Is definitely a plus.” He looked over at Andy, arm slung over the headrest, smile open. The last time they were close like this it was under quite a different set of circumstances: Neal leaving, off to a world of danger and uncertainty, and now he had returned, after staring straight into the eye of fear; he came home. Everything felt so final that February morning, like every word they spoke to one another could be their last, every glimpse of Andy’s face reminding Neal he might never take another.

But this day felt just as important somehow; not sad, not urgent, but quiet and lovely. Neal imagined he could still feel the cold, rough wood of the treehouse bare underneath his palms, though it was a metal steering wheel he gripped instead, a leather seat. He took a deep breath before he continued, but when he did, he saw Andy’s eyes were still on him, always waiting, always there.

“And...I missed you.” Glancing at the passenger beside him he swore he saw Andy’s face change, from subtle seriousness to something different, deeper. “The letters were great and all; think I’d have gone fucking nuts if you didn’t send them. But I missed writing with you, really getting down and writing all night. I missed playing music with you,” his fingers fumbled together, twitching at the thought of touching his guitar again, or touching something else. “And hanging out, just like this.” His voice went quieter, softer, though there was no one else around them to hear. The engine was dead cold by now; he could hear Andy beside him, breathing, and Neal slowed his breaths to match, in perfect synchronization. “It feels really good to be back with you here.”

Neal expected to look back at Andy and get a similar response, that it’s been weird as fuck living in Tulsa without his best friend and finally, if only for a month, things would feel close to normal again. He expected to get told off, that with all his months in war Neal came back softer than ever, and to get a damn move on to the diner because Andy was starved. What he had not expected was to see a strangely determined gleam in Andy’s eyes, seeming to deliberate with himself only for a second, then lunging forward with full conviction, pressing his mouth to Neal’s.

With hardly any time to react Neal gave out a soft gasp, startled by the forcefulness, the pure _guts_ of his best friend. This was not the teenager he had left in the treehouse last February, so tender in his kiss, so gentle in his touch. Andy crowded himself into the driver’s space, one hand on Neal’s shoulder, the other pressed flush against his chest, digging into his shirt. This was a man who kissed like he knew what he wanted and set out to take it. And Andy wanted Neal.

It was a moment, only a moment before Neal responded, kissing back with fervor, arms encircling Andy’s waist, trying to pull him closer. “Gentle” and “tender” weren’t even in his fucking vocabulary right now, nothing but raw, base thoughts, “need” and “want” and Andy’s name, over and over again in his head until he was moaning without even realizing it, parting his lips to let Andy’s tongue inside.

Rising above him, it was Andy who had all the leverage, breaking their kiss only long enough to breathe out Neal’s name on his lips, the first time Neal had heard it for months; so needy and beautiful he could have come just from Andy’s voice alone. But then Andy was upon him again, bearing down on Neal’s lips with his mouth, with teeth, tongue darting against Neal’s, taking, claiming. Only when Neal was pushed to the side of his seat, sandwiched between the Charger door and a hot, pliant body did he notice how Andy was trembling.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he moaned into Andy’s mouth, the message coming out dull and muffled from their kiss but its intention weighed all the same. Neal tried to gain the upper hand somewhere, anywhere, a palm raking up underneath Andy’s dress shirt, another reaching into his hair, but he simply couldn’t keep up, and, resigning himself to Andy’s forcefulness, he didn’t want to. It was desire pent up inside Andy for months now that he was finally getting to release, make manifest with Neal’s presence; Neal’d be a fucking idiot if he tried to stop that now.

Somehow he managed to move them both to the backseat, spacious as a fucking couch in Neal’s adored boat on wheels. Even with Andy willing and wanting, it was a feat, and Neal was pretty sure he pulled a few muscles not to mention broken a few laws of physics doing it. He pulled Andy overtop of him, feeling the weight of him on his frame, relishing in its heat. Andy was hard against him, grinding his hips in short, pulsing thrusts, hands touching everywhere, a mix of inexperience and purpose that was driving Neal wild. He sucked in Andy’s bottom lip between his teeth, triumphant in the stuttering moan he earned from Andy’s mouth.

Even without physical contact for months, Neal felt like a starving man laid before a feast, but this was heightened to the extreme, being able to touch Andy and feel him like he never had before--never knew he wanted but oh, fuck, yes he did want it now. His fingers made short work of the rest of the buttons down Andy’s shirt, quickly revealing the flesh underneath. Neal’s palms ran over Andy’s chest, up along his spine, finding his own hands shaking from the intensity. His hands must have been working on automatic, he thought, because if he stopped for one second to think about how amazing this felt, he would have been fucking gone.

Those wandering hands of Andy’s slipped underneath Neal’s clothes, one below the collar of his shirt, fingers at the back of his neck, rolling Neal’s head back, arching him into Andy’s open kiss. The other hand moved lower, down to the waistband of Neal’s jeans, his fingertips running along the skin at their hem before attacking the fly, as if the damn zipper had done something vicious that required revenge. Neal moaned shamelessly into Andy’s mouth, the sound licked up clean by flicks of Andy’s tongue, as the hand went deeper inside, touching him through his boxers and then past them as well, fingers encircling Neal’s cock.

Neal followed suit, though his hands dreaded to leave their positions against Andy’s chest, and soon he was easing Andy’s cock out of his slacks, hard and pulse throbbing, the purplish-red head slick with precome peeking out from Neal’s fist. Andy’s reaction was stronger than Neal’s, his hips bucking into the touch, breaking their kiss to let out a short, sudden shout. Neal felt the reaction in more places than one, Andy’s cock twitching in his grasp, his body begging for more.

A few short strokes and Andy’s arms buckled underneath him, crumbling in a heap atop Neal, their bodies flush together. All through it they did not stop touching, stroking one another, Andy maneuvering Neal’s dick out of his jeans, the touch igniting something primal in him. With a growl from low in his throat Neal reached down with his free hand and grabbed Andy’s ass, grinding their hips together, making Andy’s short, staccato thrusts against him into one deep, long push.

The sensations he was having were overwhelming, the tight, sure grip of Andy’s hand on him, picking up speed; the heat of Andy’s cock in his own hand, the thick, hard feel of it, the way it jerked on the upstroke, when Neal’s thumb teased at the slit. And Andy on top of him, all around him, making soft, whining noises as their lips reconnected, his control slowly unraveling. It was becoming all too much, for the both of them, and suddenly with a shudder coursing through Andy’s body he came, biting down hard on Neal’s lip, snagging a ring and tender flesh. He pressed his hips down once more and that was all it took, making Neal see stars bloom behind his eyelids, cock pumping in Andy’s grasp.

He milked him with wet, sticky fingers until Andy trembled all over, his oversensitive dick growing soft in Neal’s hand, and he whimpered, eyes still closed tight. The windows of the Charger were fogged beyond recognition, the backseat was a fucking disaster, and Neal didn’t even want to think about the condition of his jeans at that moment, because whatever damage their bodies had just done, beyond the surface it threatened to be much, much more.

Before either of them could catch their breath Neal picked Andy’s head up in his free hand, palm against his cheek, staring him straight in the eye. The rush had come upon them so sudden, and so violently intense, that Neal could do nothing but ride along with it, see where their pleasures could take them, without thinking of any consequences. He hadn’t even realized he wanted this from Andy, known where their friendship could take them, until it was here in front of him, and now Neal never wanted to go back.

The expression he saw in Andy’s eyes was unreadable; it could have been fear, confusion...all things Neal never wanted in their relationship, couldn’t bear to see creep in. “Say something,” he spoke barely above a whisper, watching for any change in Andy’s face, any indication. Neal needed to know that Andy wanted this, wanted everything that came with what they just did and everything that would come. That this was what their letters led to, all this time; that they didn’t just fuck up the best thing Neal ever had. “Please.”

Heaving a shaky yet sated sigh, Andy leaned into the touch, grateful for it, for him. That unreadable look in his eyes was gone, replaced with joy brimming under the surface, the corners crinkling as he broke out into a grin. “Welcome home, Neal,” were his words to Neal, just as soft, just as memorable.

Neal mirrored his smile; he wanted to laugh--hell, he wanted to do fucking _cartwheels_ \--but his body was so drained a smile was all his energy would allow. “Good to be home, Skib,” he said, and with the hand at Andy’s cheek pulled him down for a kiss.


	10. Chapter 10

By the next afternoon it was a standing arrangement that Neal picked Andy up after school let out, the Charger’s engine purring like a wildcat in the parking lot; they hadn’t even needed to discuss it, just silently agreed this was the way it would be. They didn’t greet each other with a hug, like the first time Neal had been waiting for him, but the smiles and sentiment were all the same.

“Got you trained already,” Andy gloated, pulling his shearling jacket in closer to his body, protecting from a sudden chill. “Maybe I should start having you pick up dry cleaning, or takeout, or something.”

He received a quick grin and a cuff to the shoulders for his trouble; Neal wanted to get in closer, give more than a friendly bat of his hand against the back of Andy’s head, but the crowd of students was too dense, and he was still remembered by a good number of teachers. “Not your fuckin’ errand boy,” he made clear, as Andy rolled his eyes as if to say, not yet.

But its effectiveness was lost when Andy yawned deeply, a sudden exhaustion hitting him once he reached the winter air. “Sleepy?” Neal asked, a toying tone to his voice.

“I’m fine,” came Andy’s warbled reply, mid-yawn, and Neal, unconvinced, couldn’t help but laugh.

“Then you shouldn’tve come out with us last night,” he said, shrugging through his denim jacket, pretending that the cold didn’t affect him. “You’re the only one who’s got shit to do in the morning.”

Andy almost looked offended by the suggestion. “And miss your welcome home party? You sure they okay-ed you when you got your head examined?”

It hadn’t been much of a formal party, as there were no decorations or a set location and there surely hadn’t been a cake, but Neal certainly was welcomed back to Tulsa by the friends and well-wishers who remained. Liquor and laughs in a convenience store parking lot, the beer bottles lined up along the curb like privates on drill sergeant inspection, standing straight, backs to the wall. It had felt like Neal had never left again, his integration back to the folds seamless, cracking jokes and throwing out smiles--and middle fingers when warranted--with the best of them. And Andy had been there, right by his side, dutifully sharing the bottle of whiskey Nick gifted him for his birthday, trying not to lean into the touch when Neal slung his arm across his shoulder like buddies, Neal fighting the urge to pull him in closer.

Yes, it had felt normal enough, welcomed back as if he were gone for a weekend camping trip instead of nearly a year in combat; but still, something had fussed at Neal’s mind the whole party, that not everything about it felt right. “It was great seeing everyone and all; not saying it wasn’t,” he told Andy, after revealing his doubts to the only person in the country to whom he would ever feel fit to reveal. “But it just felt off somehow. Like nothing’s changed...” He thought of the months he spent in Vietnam, what he had seen there; the violence he watched others do and what he had done himself. “...but maybe it should’ve.”

“Now you know where I’ve been coming from the past ten months,” Andy responded, relieved in feeling that he wasn’t alone. Just as he had the night he departed, Neal put on quite an exaggerated show for their group of friends, telling far-fetched war stories on request, boasting when prompted about victories and kills against ol’ Charlie. It had shaken Andy, so quickly after hearing Neal confess he didn’t want to speak about his experiences in Vietnam, to watch him regale their friends with tales worthy of _Hogan’s Heroes_. It took a long night and day of thought to consider that Neal’s stories to Nick and Josh were not his experiences, after all.

His voice went softer, insecure hands finding their ways into his coat pockets, his gaze falling to the ground. “The guys,” he confided, “They didn’t really know how to act. They were different because they thought you’d be different.” Through the pockets Andy stretched out his hand towards Neal, intending to give him a poke in the ribs, but the coat dampened the effect and it turned more into a caress. “Out of all the others who got drafted, Neal...you’re the only one who’s come back.”

Neal had told them about Bryan, too, still off fighting whatever good fight to be had across the Pacific, a solid rock of a soldier who had taken to combat like a drowning man learns how to swim. When he first found out Bryan was to be the unit’s commander, Neal assumed his old friend would be the one to keep him grounded, remind him of home. Oddly enough it turned out a stranger helped keep Neal’s feet on the ground and his nose out of trouble; but it was Bryan’s steadfast leadership that had kept his rifle in the air.

“I won’t be the last,” he assured Andy, though both of them knew it was not Neal’s promise to make. Reaching out, he tilted Andy’s head back up by the chin to meet his gaze; a bad idea, he thought in retrospect, as his hand lingered against Andy’s skin, brushing against his jawline, reluctant to break contact. The odd cluster of students still milled around the parking lot, and now, all he wanted to do was guide Andy’s lips back over to his. “You didn’t treat me any different,” he observed, swallowing the desire.

A hint of mischief glinted in Andy’s eyes; Neal missed seeing that side to him, visiting it only briefly in sarcastic letters. Seeing it with his own eyes was something else entirely. “That’s because I’m awesome.”

Neal grinned. “You’re full of it,” he said.

“Yeah, full of _awesome_.”

“Why do I want to kiss that smartass smirk off your face right now?” Neal’s voice went low, a dark, raspy whisper that caught Andy off-guard and left him shivering. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath to compose himself before answering; when he opened them again Neal saw a daring streak hidden within the dark brown.

“‘Cause you know the smirk’ll come right back.” And there it was again, right on cue, Andy’s dimples wide and genuine and Neal couldn’t help but laugh. “And then you’d just try to kiss it away, again, and again.” He took a step forward, half a challenge, half his own desire to be closer to Neal, to feel the heat of his body whisk away the cold. “But you can’t get rid of it, just like you can’t get rid of me.”

Before Neal could shoot back a clever retort--or take Andy up on his challenge, the dwindling crowds be damned--Andy gave him a light punch on the shoulder, the dull _whump_ through his denim jacket startling Neal. “Speaking of welcome-home parties,” he said, “You are the guest of honor tonight at _la maison de Skib_. My parents want to make sure all your army shenanigans haven’t led you to corrupt their sweet baby boy.”

Neal rolled his eyes, teeth digging into his lip to stop him from reminding Andy that indeed, he planned to corrupt him, but it had nothing to do with what he learned in the army. “Your mom making ham?” he asked, already knowing the Skibs thought the world of him, and he them, particularly Andy’s mother’s cooking.

Another punch on the shoulder; though they didn’t hurt, Neal was beginning to suspect they were Andy’s own way of keeping physical contact. “You’ll just have to take me home to find out.”

With a quick glance to his left, then his right, Andy took another step closer, until he was nearly on top of Neal--though quite differently from their positions only a day ago. He leaned in, lips so close to Neal’s ear he could feel Andy’s breath, hot like a brand. “You can, you know,” he whispered.

“Can what?” Neal asked.

He couldn’t see it but he knew it was there, plastered on Andy’s face like a riddle. “Kiss the smartass smirk off my face.”

The parking lot had emptied itself of dawdlers by then, even the laziest of high schoolers looking to get home in the cold; still Neal quickly scanned the area before his eyes rested on his grinning companion, searching to make sure that his challenge was real. With a soft chuckle to himself Neal accepted, ducking his head down to place a soft peck on Andy’s lips, then another, lingering longer, feeling Andy respond with a soft sigh. The hand that had been playfully punching at his shoulder was now gripping it, fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket.

“It didn’t go away,” he said when he pulled away, only inches from Andy’s smiling mouth, refusing to part any farther.

Andy gave Neal’s shoulder a squeeze as the smirk returned, drawing his tongue out and licking his lips for good measure. “I guess you’ll have to try harder.”

***

“I think I’m gonna fuckin’ _burst,_ ” Neal exaggerated, melodramatically falling onto Andy’s bed in a heap. Groaning, he rubbed his stomach with one hand while draping the other over his face, blocking his view of Andy’s rolling eyes. “Andy, I think your mom’s trying to kill me. Death by ham.”

“Excuse me,” Andy objected to the accusation that his mother was attempting to murder his best friend--especially through her well-cooked food. “She didn’t force the three helpings down your throat. If I recall, that was all you.”

Neal groaned again, reminded of the amount of dinner he had ingested all at the Skibs’ behest. Andy’s parents were as hospitable as ever to their guest returning from the war, but with every innocent question they asked about his time in Vietnam Neal shoved another forkful into his mouth, reluctant to answer.

After the dinner the pair had excused themselves to Andy’s room; taking the walk upstairs felt twice as long for Neal, his head buzzing with thoughts of what Andy might be plotting they do once they arrived at their destination. Giving a polite goodbye to his hosts he followed closely behind Andy, their hands brushing against one another on the banister, nearly causing Neal to trip and tumble all the way back down again.

Peeking out from underneath his arm, Neal spied Andy standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by the clutter that the structure of private school could not afford to him, nor the restrictions of the army would allow to Neal. His arms were crossed in front of his chest as his gaze was on Neal, nervously biting his lower lip, a contemplative look on his face. There may have been hesitation on Andy’s part but Neal, already sprawled out on the bed, didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

Lips curving into a smile, Neal beckoned with a jut of his chin and the slightest pulse of his hips; as if Andy didn’t know his intentions already. “C’mere.”

Andy’s eyes widened, incredulous. “My _family’s_ downstairs,” he protested as he made his way towards the bed in the corner of the room. When he reached the edge he leaned down, weight shifting onto his slender arms rooted on either side of Neal, one knee already hiked up onto the mattress. He  had to argue the point, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

Neal clucked his tongue, calling Andy out on his offense. “Like I didn’t see you lock the door behind us,” he said, eyes narrowing as he watched Andy’s head drop, hiding a guilty blush on his cheeks.

Neal wrapped his arms around his waist, pulling Andy down hips-first overtop him. The heat and weight of Andy’s body against his was becoming so familiar now, but Neal wanted it to be more familiar still, memories of his touch coming back to him as easily as breathing. Though, it could be argued, with his hips grinding into Andy’s, hands roving down to cup his ass in each palm, breathing was coming pretty difficult to Neal at that moment.

“We can be quiet,” he whispered, neck craning upwards, lips so close to Andy’s he could feel the other man’s stuttered breath on his face.

He watched Andy’s eyes close as he leaned forward, their noses brushing together, eyelashes almost tickling against Neal’s cheek. “I don’t want to be,” he responded, just as soft, before closing his mouth down on Neal’s.

A surge of emotion rocketed through Neal, opening up immediately to Andy as they kissed, Andy’s tongue snaking between his lips and licking at Neal’s teeth. It had been barely two days since he had been in Tulsa; only yesterday had he tasted Andy on his tongue and held him in his arms for the first time, and already it felt like they had been at this forever, innately knowing where to touch, how to kiss, the best way to elicit that moan from each other’s lips. Of all the months separated, clutching onto letters like dying men, aching to be closer but unable to give reasons why, Neal and Andy finally understood all of that unnamed desire was to be together, just like this. Neal shivered at the realization, involuntarily moaning loud into Andy’s throat, and Andy broke the kiss, hissing out a _shhh_ until their labored breathing slowed.

“You taste like ham,” Andy joked, smacking his lips together indulgently.

Two could play that game. Neal ran his tongue over his lips to test out Andy’s statement; personally he thought he tasted rather normal and not at all like dinner, but the act itself kept Andy’s attention, brown eyes going wide as Neal licked, leaving a shiny, wet sheen on his lips accented by the light of Andy’s desk lamp. He shrugged, pleased at the reaction he was getting. “I taste pretty good to me,” he observed, feeling Andy laugh throughout his body as well as seeing it on his face.

“I never said it was a bad thing,” he pointed out. He gave one last kiss to Neal’s lips before pushing himself up again, amused at how Neal’s head unconsciously followed him, neck craning up to make contact. The hard cock poking Andy through his jeans was doing some straining of its own, too. “You know, I wasn’t sure about this,” he said, his voice hushed and reverent, fingers idly tracing the borders of ink peeking above Neal’s shirt collar. Neal could barely breathe for the sensation, the feather-light touch upon his skin, the concentration with which Andy looked into his eyes. “Didn’t know if you’d be ready...hell, if I’d be ready.”

Neal’s breath caught in his throat, his eyes widening at what Andy might propose. “Andy...” he said, surprised at how raspy and needy his voice sounded, how dry his mouth had become. His hands inched down from Andy’s hips to his thighs, palms running up and down their length, slowly yet hungrily waiting for Andy’s next words.

A small, assured smile spread on Andy’s lips. “But I think we are, Neal.” But instead of coming in closer to Neal’s embrace Andy pulled back, sitting up until he was straddling Neal’s hips, and then, with one last touch upon Neal’s skin, pushed off the bed entirely.

He left Neal bewildered and wanting, his eyebrows knit together in confusion, and Neal was not proud to admit he whined in protest when Andy broke contact, already missing the familiar weight in his arms. “Hey--!” he said, cursing himself for how he sounded like one needy motherfucker. But god _damn_ it, if someone leads you up to their bedroom and locks the door, lays overtop you until you’re hard and nearly begging for it... Neal thought at the very least he deserved an explanation for why Andy was walking farther away instead of closer to him, both clothed, both untouched and unsatisfied.

But Neal’s protests ceased the moment he saw Andy’s true intentions: he headed towards the corner of the room, where two bulky black cases were propped up against the wall, nestled among the clutter like relics before rows of charred votives. He picked one up in his arms, holding it as gingerly as a child, its hard exterior adorned with record store stickers and lazy, half-mad designs for imagined fame of their own. Neal recognized it immediately, an entirely different desire sweeping over him; he sat up, eyes wide and hands suddenly itching to hold something other than his best friend in his arms.

Andy walked back over to Neal, the smile still on his face, brightening now as he saw Neal’s attention turn to what was in his hands. Setting it down on the bed next to Neal, he found his own perch at the mattress edge, brimming with excitement of his own. “You said to take good care of it,” he didn’t need to remind Neal of his own request from months ago; it was as clear in his mind as the guitar in front of him, the metal clasps of the case at his fingertips, just in his reach. “And I did. At least...I hope I did.”

He flipped the clasps open with subdued respect, something deep inside Neal telling him this was not an act to be rushed. As he lifted the case’s lid a true sight for his sore eyes stared back at him, the warm spruce face shining like gold, light glinting off the strings. Andy had certainly kept his word: the guitar was pristine and polished, spotless in its perfection, like the day Neal had left it. But he had also kept that other promise, to _play_ the guitar as if it were his own; without even touching the instrument yet, just holding his hand out against the pearl inlaid pickguard, he felt a brimming energy within the guitar, wood and metal carved into something beautiful--well-kept, well-played, and well-loved in his absence.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered in spite of himself, blue eyes wide and reflecting the shine off the golden wood. Neal had played another guitar since he put this one away for his duties, David’s smuggled gift during basic training a calming instrument, grounding him when he needed to place fingers to strings. But it still had not been his guitar, like strapping on another man’s ill-fitting boots instead of running barefoot, and even that had been months ago, the feel of the wood in his arms replaced with the cold metal of a rifle.

He had been waiting for this a long, long time, and now that the guitar was back beside him once more, Neal barely knew where to begin.

When he cradled it in his arms it fit like hot wax in a clay mold, filling gaps and voids, melting to Neal’s touch as if it had always meant to be there. Hands found their natural ways back to their positions, one wrist curving at the neck, the other resting against the pickguard, acclimating itself, eager to be home.

With an easy flick of the wrist, a press of fingers down upon the frets, Neal strummed out a chord, low and simple, letting the sound reverberate in the hollow body of the guitar and in his own body as well. Months had passed since he experienced that feeling, of music vibrating in his bones instead of the power of mortar shells; but now it was back, filling him, invigorating Neal with creativity and life that had been silent since he left. He shivered; closing his eyes, he hit another chord, and then another, and ran a quick scale with nimble fingers that had been still for too long.

But he cursed under his breath when his ambitions ran faster than his fingers allowed, running through a riff and hitting a sour note. “I’m a little rusty,” he admitted, a blush rising to his cheeks. It was the first time he ever botched a guitar run in front of Andy, but the other man said nothing about it, perched at the end of the mattress, staring intently at Neal’s hands, and at Neal.

“Don’t...” Andy shook his head to protest. He held his hand out, reaching towards Neal and the strings, wishing with only a touch he could start him playing again, to just listen to the music he missed for so long. But he held back, his gaze locking with Neal’s, bottom lip drawn in between his teeth in contemplation. “Play,” he said, making sure his voice was lower than the sound of the guitar in Neal’s hands. “Doesn’t matter what it sounds like. Just...play.” The hand came down to rest on Neal’s knee, thumb caressing the joints softly through his jeans. “ _Please._ ”

That entreaty dug at the heart of Neal, a very similar request of the same, simple word made by himself to Andy so many months ago. Andy twisted in his seat, his hand leaving Neal’s side and reaching for the bedside table. “Hold on,” he said, trying to secure his music folder in his grasp without getting off the bed. “I’ve got our songs here--”

But he was cut off by the sound of soft strumming coming from the guitar, his voice immediately stilled, breath catching in his throat lest he miss one note. Neal didn’t need the sheet music they had written, at least not for this song: the first he had penned while away, Neal had sent it to Andy with the single word scrawled on the top, asking him to play it, use it; mold it to make it perfect. They had written at least a dozen other songs through their letters, fine-tuning lyrics and melodies, but this was the one they always returned to, reflecting on its simple harmony, performed by guitar alone. There were no lyrics yet, as there had been none when Neal started its composition; the music already spoke volumes to the two men, whether scribbled onto paper or played out in a quiet room.

Neal might have considered himself rusty but on this song he was pitch-perfect, remembering every note and detail as if the music were laid out for him. The notes were delicate, feather-light coming from his acoustic, so different from the heavy, shredding guitar riffs of their harder songs. And yet, there was power in the notes, compelling everyone within earshot to listen, hold their breath and wait for the song to run its course, tell its tale. His fingers drifted effortlessly on the strings as he concentrated, meandering through the melody, slowing the pace where the notes inferred soft contemplation, until they petered out with a whimpering flourish, how Andy and Neal both decided it had to end.

Once the song was finished Neal looked back up with expectant eyes, hoping to see excitement on Andy’s face, inspired by the song to write more, pick up his own guitar and play well into the night. But something else was etched onto his face, a solemn, reverent stare, dark brown eyes wide and his jaw square, holding in emotions that were sure to flood out.

“Good?” Neal asked softly, the hint of a smile on his lips.

The question allowed Andy to let go of the breath he didn’t realize he was holding; he felt almost like he was falling out of a trance, mesmerized by the hold Neal’s music put over him. It had been more than simply “good,” Neal knew at least that and Andy was damn sure of it. He had been so excited to hear Neal play again, to watch him experience the music the way only he could, but he hadn’t been prepared at all for how it felt to watch Neal there, sitting on his bed after all he had been through, playing a song they had written together by memory.

Andy couldn’t even speak to give his answer; the song, the playing, everything about this moment was more than good, it was fucking perfect.

Instead, he waited until he was sure Neal had finished playing, watching the other man’s eyes as a warm silence filled the room. Then, very carefully the hand at Neal’s knee returned, pressing down softly, Andy slowly invading Neal’s space inch by inch. He held his gaze until he leaned in closer, faces inches apart, noses nearly touching. Softly, barely breathing, Andy touched his lips to Neal’s, the quiet gravity of the moment as solid between them as the guitar still nestled in Neal’s arms.

***

Neal stayed over that night, the first in what he soon realized would be many late nights with Andy, one way or the other. After playing a few more songs alone, Neal convinced Andy to shift from spectator to collaborator, picking up his own guitar from its case and making Neal’s solos into a duet. He sang on the songs they had written with lyrics, voice lifting above the sounds of guitars, gritty when the tone was hard and the music unrelenting, but smooth and soft when it needed to be, like slow-poured honey, free from the bee’s sting. When he sang the first notes of Godspeed Neal was so suddenly entranced by the maturity of his voice, the depth Andy gave his words, he completely forgot to continue playing, his fingers slowing to a halt as he listened with his entire body. It was a good thing his guitar lay in his lap, hiding what else had developed there.

There had been the relief Neal felt when his boots first touched down on American soil again, when he smelled the wafting scents of home-cooked food coming from the kitchens of Tulsa suburbs as he drove past, returning to his childhood bedroom, sleeping in his childhood bed. But nothing so far compared to what he felt that night, listening to Andy sing, playing their songs together, melody and harmony; hearing them for the first time for what they were always meant to be. It was there, surrounded by music, the feel of his guitar in his hands again and the sound of Andy’s voice filling his ears, that Neal felt like he was truly home.

They played well into the night, fleshing out old songs, falling into familiar step with the ones recorded only on paper, until Andy’s father knocked on the door and tersely reminded the pair that they fashioned the garage into a makeshift studio for a _reason_. Then they talked for what must have been hours, keeping their voices barely above a whisper, filling the silent space with words they didn’t think they had left to share. Neal let the late hour reveal the fears he felt in Vietnam, telling Andy of the soldiers who cried at night in the dark, and the bombs and hidden mines that took them away in the daylight. Andy went on about the student meeting at the university he had finally decided to attend, how the organization’s members worked to take their anger and resentment and turn it into action; that it was the first time he told anyone aloud that he was scared.

“You told _me,_ ” Neal reminded him as they lay upon the bed, their heads on either end of one pillow. Andy told his mother they’d make up a bed on the floor for Neal, even accepted the extra duvet and pillows when she offered them, but they lay in the corner, as carefully folded as they were received.

Andy smiled, his finger tracing along Neal’s jawline softly, feeling the rough stubble bristle against his skin. Ever the troublemaker, Neal seemed determined to grow a full beard in the month he had away from the army, even on sheer will alone. “I did,” he said, pleasantly surprised that Neal had remembered, then even more surprised when Neal’s head turned, tongue pulling Andy’s finger into his mouth and sucking.

When they awoke the next morning, the scent of waffles and coffee drifting up from the kitchen, they were a mess of bedsheets and limbs, tangled during the night in the conflicting battle to get comfortable and get closer at the same time. Andy, accustomed to sleeping alone on a single for seventeen years, had stretched out during the night, long, slender arms and legs sprawled across the mattress and not letting Neal’s presence get in his way. He apologized--once for the tiny bed two grown men had to sleep in, and once for taking up all of that precious space without realizing it. But Neal simply shook his head, shrugging off the remorseful look on Andy’s face. He had spent months sleeping on rough clay ground, a soaked rice paddy his mattress, the thick jungle air his blanket. That night, in a narrow little bed, waking up with Andy’s warm body nestled against him, arm slung around his waist and steady breath against his neck, Neal considered it the best night’s sleep he ever had.


	11. Chapter 11

“I told you, it’s a surprise.”

Andy led him out the diner’s swinging doors towards the Skib home, nearly bouncing from excitement as he dodged the traffic across Elgin. He tried once to take Neal’s hand and physically guide him back to the house; although Neal didn’t turn down any invitation to touch Andy these days, he resisted, preferring not to look like two schoolboys sprinting for the ice cream truck.

“Yeah, but what kind of surprise?” he shouted the question at his friend, opting for a more leisurely stroll. The past few days let Andy and Neal fall into a comfortable, blissful routine, with Neal picking Andy up after school, if Andy hadn’t already decided to ditch his afternoon classes for more stimulating activities. More times than not Andy had let a slip of the tongue reveal he had a surprise waiting for Neal, and it conjured up thoughts of lust and fascination within him, until he could barely contain himself for the pure possibilities. Already that week they only made it so far as to the Charger’s backseat, shirts unbuttoned, mouths on each other, hands shoved down the front of each other’s pants.

The grin Andy shot Neal over his shoulder revealed nothing but mischief in his plans. “A good one.”

When they ducked down a side street leading to the house, Neal caught up with him with a slow yet broad pace, the enduring march of a soldier. His arm came up around Andy’s waist, bringing their hips together, chest to back. Even through their winter layers Neal felt the curves of Andy’s body against him and his eyes fluttered closed with desire. “The last time you had a ‘surprise’ for me,” he said, low and raspy into Andy’s ear, and he could feel the shudder in both their bodies. “It was the Beatles’ White Album.”

“You hadn’t heard it yet,” Andy argued, but any conviction in his voice ebbed away with the flick of Neal’s tongue against his earlobe, drawing it in between pierced lips.

“Such a tease,” Neal said, though with the way his hips pulsed against Andy’s, slow yet persistent, it could be said he knew a bit about teasing, himself.

Andy leaned his head back, eyes drifting closed as he indulged in Neal’s touch. Thank fucking god they were the only ones bull-headed enough to be walking around the Tulsa streets in this kind of cold. “You’ve gotta keep up-- _ah_ \--with current music, Neal.”

“And the time before that, you wanted me to see the darkroom Alexis set up.”

He felt the laugh ripple through Andy’s body. “There wasn’t much teasing going on that time, if I remember.” A roll of Kodachrome to develop, an afternoon to themselves, a family who understood letting in any light from an open door destroyed the photographer’s work. Neal learned quickly the running faucet drowned out any sound from the room, and Andy learned exactly how loud Neal’s moans could get.

“So,” The arm at Andy’s waist dropped deliberately, the palm of Neal’s hand making no mistake in brushing against the front of Andy’s pants. “Am I going to like this surprise?”

Biting his own lip out of restraint, Andy answered, shaking his head. “You only got one thing on your mind at all times, don’t you.”

He didn’t; there was much more Neal focused on throughout the day, like the big, glaring number of days he had left in Tulsa, dwindling with each sunrise, hot and bright as neon in his mind. But after spending months with large, heavy thoughts all around him, fears that he may die and that he must fight in order to live, having only thoughts of the next time he could get Andy’s clothes off was a peaceful relief.

“Nah,” he said instead. “I think about music, too. Sometimes.” He gave Andy a wink and, daringly, a quick peck on the cheek. Thinking of music and thinking of Andy were almost synonymous by now; Neal couldn’t bear to live with one and not the other. “Now, what’s the surprise?”

Rolling his eyes, Andy couldn’t help but laugh; damn if Neal wasn’t persistent. Reluctantly he worked his way out of Neal’s grasp and kept them on their path. They had an appointment to make, after all. “I know it’s a little early,” he started, reaching into his sheepskin jacket. “But you’ll thank me for it. Really.” Finding what he was looking for, Andy fished out a sheet of heavy paper, his eyes lit up with excitement and his mouth a wide grin as he handed it over to Neal.

“Happy birthday, Neal.”

The nature of the present was surprising to Neal--considering his true birthday was more than a week away, he hadn’t expected gifts at all quite yet--but even more puzzling was its content. A single sheet of paper, heavier than letter stock, decorated with a strange design and the location details of a music hall downtown. Neal didn’t know what to make of it; brow furrowed, he flipped the sheet in his hands and then back again. “It’s an ad for the Flytrap,” he said, his voice wary. How exactly was this a birthday present?

But the smile did not fade from Andy’s face; he moved in closer to Neal at the intersection, pointing at the finer print underneath the venue’s logo. “Not just any ad,” he clarified. “Look again.”

He did, and suddenly he wasn’t so quick to dismiss the sheet of paper. “This...” he said, the air around him suddenly hot, his heart beating faster than it ever had in combat. His own hand moved to point at the same space Andy’s had, the fingertip tracing the words there in black and white. “That’s my name...”

When he looked back at Andy he had all the confirmation he needed in those dark brown eyes, wide for Neal’s excitement, and finally Neal understood why his best friend had been almost bouncing in his seat at the diner. “I’ve been trying to make some connections while you’ve been gone,” he explained. “You know, make some friends at the bars downtown. See if I can get any of them to sneak me in without I.D.” From the look of the flyer, Neal thought, he must have been at least a little successful. “I pulled a lot of strings for this...bothered a lot of people, let me tell you, especially since no one’s heard of you, but...”

“But you got a gig,” Neal finished, his own eyes suddenly wide with a smile to match.

Andy nodded, already noticing the happiness building in Neal’s bones, waiting for the right moment to come out. “I got a gig.”

The place was small, Andy explained, and there was no pay, and Neal was lucky to even be allowed on a stage with only an enthusiastic teen to vouch for him. But a show was a show, and the intimacy would be perfect for Neal and his music, the first time those songs would be played for anyone’s ears besides Neal and Andy’s. Andy had told him once, that he wanted Neal to experience what he had that night of the Who concert; that he hoped Neal could one day get that rush of adrenaline on stage, the joy of sharing his talents with the world. Now, thanks to him, on the day after Christmas he would get that chance.

It was the best birthday gift Neal could ever dream of.

There was only one catch to the startlingly amazing news, and Neal saw it right away, staring out boldly from the concert flyer. “Where are you on this?” he asked, scanning the rest of the names.

A bemused scoff rose from Andy’s throat. “Out in the audience, where I’m _supposed_ to be,” he answered. When he looked up, the expression on Neal’s face told him it was the wrong answer.

“You’re bullshitting, right?” He tapped the flyer in his hands, more aggressively than before. “You don’t actually think this is happening without you.”

“It’s your birthday,” Andy argued. “My present to you.” He remembered the roar of the crowd when Daltrey walked onstage in Oklahoma City, how Townsend’s subtle genius was washed away in the bright lights of the stage. How the singer drowned out the brilliance of the songwriter, the poet. “This has got to be your night, not anybody else’s.”

Neal still looked at Andy like he had suddenly sprouted two heads, and the new one had just said some glaringly offensive things about his mother. “Like fuck it is.” The songs they had written, sent back and forth across oceans, were as much Andy’s as they were Neal’s, and his best friend should have damn well known that. It wasn’t about just one musician or the other, it was for them both.

“This,” he waved the flyer in Andy’s face, indignant. “Doesn’t work without you. Our music’s harmony, it’s layers; it can’t be just one fucker on the stage with a guitar.” Neal’s voice softened as they rounded the corner to the Skibs’ house. He had a lot to thank Andy for in the past few months, so much credit to give, and it wasn’t just for being the rhythm to Neal’s lead. “Every song I’d play, we wrote them all together. It wouldn’t feel right without you right there next to me.”

The tiniest of smiles curved in at the corners of Andy’s lips; he knew he could argue till he was out of breath and it’d get him nowhere, Neal had already made up his mind. “You would need another guitar for the full arrangements,” he conceded.

“And a singer,” Neal said. “No one wants to hear my shitty voice on stage, might as well strangle a cat for my accompaniment.”

“Shut up,” Andy immediately protested. “You’ve got a great voice.”

Neal shook his head, smiling. “Not like yours I don’t.” The grin went dirty as he ran a hand through Andy’s hair, wondering how it would feel let it grow shaggy and long like he wanted. “Besides, I need a pretty face up there. Attracts the ladies.”

Andy laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, his experiences of attraction limited literally to landing a flaming bra on his head and a strawberry blond who was very much not a lady. “But maybe we’ll find that pretty face when we get to my house.”

“What do you--” Neal asked, his brow creasing, puzzled. But before he could finish his thought his own eyes and ears answered it for him: a small group of men were loitering around the Skibs’ garage-turned-studio with expectant looks on their faces. Some held sticks, others empty-handed as they waited in the cold, all watching as each of their number took his turn inside the garage, letting loose and wailing on a borrowed drum kit.

“You need a singer,” Andy conceded as they approached the garage, auditions already underway with Nick screening applicants and making sure everyone knew what they were getting into. “But you also need a drummer.”

Auditions were a long, painstaking process, taking more time than they thought would be necessary to thin the herd. Musicians of all levels had come, from experienced professionals who bolted the moment they heard there’d be no pay, to talentless opportunists who were looking for their Ringo Starr moment. Half of the prospective drummers were there because Nick made the mistake of offering free food in the newspaper advertisement.

“Would’ve got me here, and I don’t even play drums,” Andy said, before Neal reminded him that since they were the ones offering, they also had to pay for said refreshments.

Finally, long after the sun dropped below the horizon, they decided upon one drummer, one talent any of the three men could recognize the moment he stepped up behind that drum kit. He started out slowly, a steady beat against the kick bass to get his feel for the foreign kit; testing the waters. Then came a literal barrage of beats, almost out of nowhere, at lightning speed, carving paths through the air like butcher knives through butter. He was not only technically perfect but lyrical in his beats, intricately weaving a tale of rhythm through the drums, slowing the momentum just enough to urge his listeners on for more. When he ended with a cymbal crash and a flurry of long, stringy hair, his judges were stunned into silence, their jaws hanging open.

After a few moments the drummer rose from his seat, anxiously tucking strands of his hair behind his ears. “So...do I have the gig?” he asked, his slight timidness in stark contrast to the confident way he had attacked the drums. “‘Cause, you know, I gotta get home before my curfew...”

Neal spoke first, quickly jumping to his feet, extending his hand for a congratulatory handshake before he could think twice. “Oh, you got it,” he said, watching the giddy grin spread across his new drummer’s face. Behind him Andy questioned Nick in low tones what he exactly meant by curfew, and if, amazingly, they found the one untapped musician in Tulsa that was even younger than him. “What’s your name, kid?”

When the drummer told him, his eyes shining with excitement, Neal matched his grin. Four hours ago he wouldn’t have believed he’d say the words himself; but now, with Andy’s cherished present to him in place, it could be the start of something much bigger. “Well then; welcome to our band, Kyle.”

  
***

Rehearsal became another facet to their daily routine, Neal picking Andy up from school, holing themselves up in the garage for hours on end, emerging only when dinner was offered, and more often than not falling asleep at their amps or in Andy’s bed, joyfully waiting out the hours when they did it all again. In only one afternoon Neal hammered out basic drum rhythms for some of the harder songs in their repertoire. Kyle filled in the rest, working on talent and instinct while listening to Neal and Andy’s run-throughs, adding in the more complicated and inspired beats where they seemed to naturally fit. He grinned madly at his older bandmates as he improvised a soft cymbal crescendo into one particular song, pleased with the final result. But with a tendency towards absent-mindedness--the pair had noticed it right away, when Kyle showed up prompt and enthusiastic to practice at a house four doors down--it would be interesting to see if Kyle remembered his bouts of creative inspiration.

There were days when Andy, already restless with his mundane schoolwork, let alone the forced separation from Neal for seven hours, decided to play hooky. Playfully blaming it on Neal’s bad influence they would drive out to Keystone Lake, frozen and placid, and watch geese slip along its surface; or head north towards the arts district and warm themselves up in the movie theater, barely registering the film after the third time they had seen it. Or sometimes they would just let the Charger take them as far as it could go, past the Bixby mansions to the south and over the lazy Kansas River, to barren cornfields and swamp marshes where they could be alone. With no farmers inspecting their fields until next year’s thaw there’d be not a sound for miles, save for soft moans, the dull clink of beer bottles, and the occasional rumble of laughter from the backseat.

“These kinds of fields are everywhere over there,” Neal told him once, and qualified that instead of corn, the peasants’ livelihood balanced on rice, and those fields got so muddy at times not even a MUTT jeep could get through, much less his Charger. “They’re all overgrown, untended...we’d kick the villagers out of a militarized area, no one can stay, not even the goats. Leaves a lot of tall elephant grass, and that shit’s a mess.” He took a deep breath, inhaling the smoke from his cigarette and blowing it out his nose, like a dragon stoking his internal fires. “You never know who could be hiding in fields like this, waiting for you to make a wrong move, take a step towards their snipers.”

Andy shivered and it wasn’t from the cold; he tried to hide the telltale gooseflesh rising on his skin from Neal, but it was futile, laying together half-dressed in the backseat, skin touching skin. “Thought you didn’t want to talk about the war,” he said.

All was quiet for a moment as Neal contemplated his answer; he dragged a hand down Andy’s side, past the curves of his hips, down to his thighs until it came back up again slowly, finally resting against his chest. “Not to everyone,” he said softly, fingers idly dancing around a nipple, making Andy shiver for a different reason. “But...you know me best. You understand everything else about me.” He leaned into Andy’s body, pierced lips trailing along the hollow of his throat. Not quite ready for a second round just yet, but he didn’t really mind the quiet spaces in between, either. “I need you to understand this, too.”

Letting his eyes drift closed, Andy solemnly nodded, not yet grasping its gravity, but knowing it was important to _Neal_ , and so it would be important to him. He gave out a deep sigh, the earth so quiet and still all around them, no silent soldiers stalking them through the brittle fields; then Neal leaned in closer and Andy tasted tobacco smoke on his tongue, and deeper underneath that, the familiar taste of Neal.

Once, after Andy ducked out of study hall to find the Charger purring in the parking lot, they drove all the way west to Oklahoma City with only their instincts and the Interstate as their guide. They surprised Jennie outside her dormitory, the building’s matron uncooperative in letting two strange men wait for her inside her room, and despite having never met, she recognized Neal on sight. They hit it off immediately--better than Andy ever expected--and bonded over the efforts they both undertook in order to endure the friendship of Andy Skib.

“And that camera!” Jennie said as Neal nodded, laughing in agreement. “He’s always got that camera in your face, always taking pictures.” She pointed to the satchel at Andy’s side, light for the schoolbooks and texts he had left behind. “It’s in there, Andy, isn’t it? I bet it is.”

“But I want photos of you two,” he defended himself, protectively clutching the bag to his chest.

“He’s a _fiend_ with that thing,” Neal explained, rolling his eyes as his best friend pouted and complained of being ganged up on. “Wants to document everything, like he’s freakin’ David Brinkley. But mostly I think he just wants future blackmail material.”

Andy shrugged as he took out the Nikon from the satchel; no need to keep it under wraps any longer, he figured, if it was the topic of conversation. “I’ve got the darkroom now,” he argued, his legacy from his sister, who gave him full run of the room once she left for college in New York. “Might as well use it.”

Jennie threw her hands up in mock exasperation. “Just don’t use it on me all the time,” she said, in what Andy thought she must consider her threatening tone. “You’ve got to give a woman warning on these types of things so she can look decent for the camera.”

“What happened to all your ‘equal rights’ stuff?” Andy held up the camera to his eye level, focusing his lens in the dim dormitory light. “You and Neal have equal opportunity to look horrible in the pictures I take.”

Jennie started, indignant, protesting that her plight for equal rights for women was not about photogenicity, which Neal had in every tattooed inch of his body but she could only achieve with mascara and concealer first. In quick response Neal pulled a face at even the accusation of being photogenic, Jennie’s jaw dropped open, appalled, and Andy snapped his photograph.

“Yep,” he finally conceded, before either of his friends could figure out what he had just done. “I guess I do use some of these for blackmail.”

They said their goodbyes late in the night, Jennie apologizing to her night-owl friends but she had to get some rest for finals in the morning. On the dark, solitary drive back to Tulsa Andy expressed his relief that his two friends with such different dispositions got along so well together, in what he hoped would be the first of many meetings. They were so friendly, he added with a laugh, he was halfway convinced they were going to run away together.

Neal reached over with a free hand and patted Andy affectionately on the cheek. “Never without you,” he said.

***

On the days when Andy found classes to be tolerable enough to stay in the building for the entire day, Neal was right there waiting for him, ready to drive off to rehearsal, or a diner for food of higher quality than a school cafeteria, or just about anywhere a restless teenager’s imagination could take them. He usually exited the school alone--rushing past the doors, seconds after the dismissal bell, eager to end his time away. But one day close to the Christmas vacation Neal spied him conversing with a teacher, too young to be called middle-aged and too bald to be called young. It took him a moment before he recognized the history teacher Andy had written so much about.

It appeared he wasn’t the only one Andy had been talking to. “So you’re Neal,” the teacher said as they approached the Charger, extending his hand. “Heard a lot about you from Andy here.” He narrowed his eyes as they shook hands, scrutinizing Neal; the grip on Neal’s palm was surprisingly strong, a mark that the old veteran hadn’t lost his touch quite yet. “You _were_ in my senior seminar a few years back, weren’t you...?”

Neal had to laugh: whether it was his appearance or his academic record, he was certainly one to notice. “When I showed up, I was.”

He opened his mouth to address the teacher by his title, what Andy had called him in all of his letters; but before Neal could get it out he held his hand up to stop him. “Monty’d just be fine,” he said. Having students call him “Mister” was one thing, but anyone else and he felt a decade older with each “Anderson.”

“Maybe I should be calling you ‘Corporal,’ instead,” Neal said, his arm halfway towards a salute. Monty’s face showed the recognition but there was no shock to his reaction; he should have known, Andy would reveal more about him in his letters to his best friend than just being a history teacher.

Monty shook his head. “Not necessary,” he waved off the proposal; he hadn’t been saluted in nearly a decade, he sure as hell wasn’t going to start with Neal. “I’m retired; honorably discharged. I’m out of that racket now.” He eyed Neal, his skin adorned with colorful tattoos and piercings, his face unshaven, hair growing back into messy, strawberry blond tufts--all appearances both the school and the army frowned upon. It didn’t take more than a passing glance to know Neal Tiemann wasn’t cut out for a military career. “And I take it you’ll be out of it soon, too.”

Neal managed a grim smile. “One way or the other.”

“He’s in for a month; free leave, I think they called it,” Andy interjected, his smile brightly compensating for Neal’s. He tried to fill the conversation up with useless words, information Monty didn’t ever need to know, just so he didn’t have to think about the fact it was already Day Thirteen, and the hours were growing shorter still. He spoke about the arrangement Neal and David had made with the government that allowed them this pass back to home, to normalcy, if only for a short time, and told Monty about the upcoming show at the Flytrap, how they had been practicing night and day for this opportunity.

“Night and day, eh?” Monty looked askance at both young men, scratching his bald head underneath his winter hat. “So is that why I’ve seen less of you around the school corridors.” Andy started, suddenly on defense, but Monty assured him that so long as he wasn’t skipping out on Monty’s classes, he’d keep mum about the absences. It appeared, he said, watching the excitement grow on Andy’s face as he described the preparation for their gig, with Neal looking on in quiet admiration, that he had a good enough reason for playing hooky.

“Also explains why no one’s seen you around the meetings lately,” Monty added, his tone a bit sincerer, more serious than before. “But I assume you’ve been busy.”

Andy tried to hide the blush creeping up on his face as he nodded. He tried not to think about the last time he had ditched a meeting of the activist group, when he found himself in a much more preferable position thrusting into Neal’s mouth, the head of his cock tickled by Neal’s tongue. It didn’t help matters any when Neal slung an arm casually across Andy’s shoulders, flashing them both a grin that told Andy he knew exactly what he was remembering, and told Monty, “Oh, I’ve been keeping him pretty busy, alright.”

Blissfully unaware, Monty nodded, noting that indeed, rehearsals for performances can get rather time-consuming--he played the bass guitar as a youth, he said, and had similar aspirations as the two men before him. “Did a different kind of tour than Korea,” he joked, but then grew serious once more. “Not pushing you into anything here, Andy, I know you’ve got a full dance card right now. They could just really use someone like you helping out, show there’s some real concerned youth out there. You’d do a whole lot of good, you know.”

“I know,” Andy replied. He apologized for skipping out on the meetings--which he meant wholeheartedly--and told Monty he would try to get to more in the future--a promise a little less than sincere, considering he had no intentions to do anything short of taking a piss without Neal being involved, so long as the other man was in town.

It was then that Monty suggested that the two did not have to be mutually exclusive: Neal was welcome to join in on the meetings while he was in Tulsa. “They’re open to anyone who wants to end this war--peacefully,” he added, recalling the number of his superiors--now Neal’s--who would prefer a different means to the same end. “Lots of soldiers are coming out of active duty and straight into Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but the SDS is always looking for the extra support, too.”

Neal’s lips pursed shut tightly, his jaw clenched. It was a noble endeavor, he thought, and one he knew Andy was getting more involved with by the day. But the soldier in him, the darker part cultivated in the Vietnamese jungles, knew the word “war” was more than politicians and their treaties, more than bombs and battles and nameless statistics rattled off on the evening news. A year ago he would have reveled blissfully in the idea that ending war could be so simple; but after seeing bodies broken and villages burned, after fighting and killing for every scrap of life left in him, Neal couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

And, despite Monty assuring him that many veterans were joining the ranks of protesters, Neal couldn’t see any other soldier believing it, either. “Not much of a veteran yet,” he told Monty instead with a shrug. “Still got another tour after this. Seventeen days and I’m back in the thick of it, whether you, me, or all your protesters like it or not.” Beside him he felt Andy shiver and go cold, shirking himself away from Neal’s touch at the reminder. “And either way, I don’t think ol’ Uncle Sam’ll be too happy with a soldier pulling on a peace pipe days before he’s set to go back to war.”

“Well, peace or not,” Monty said with a conciliatory nod to Neal, “That pipe’s always there for you if you’re lookin’ to pull it.”

He left with those parting words and the promise to make an appearance at the Flytrap. Even without his support of their show, Neal had made a decision about Monty and his first impression. “I like that guy!” he told Andy as they drove back to the Skibs’ house. “He sure says some funny shit!”


	12. Chapter 12

“Welcome to the bachelor pad.”

Andy eyed the surroundings Neal presented to him, his best friend so proud of the space before them, and he cocked an eyebrow, trying not to be skeptical but failing. “Neal...it’s a basement.”

The excited smile drooped slightly on Neal’s face. “It’s a finished basement,” he argued, already knowing it was a lost battle. Indeed, he had brought real lamps into the room since the last time Andy had been down there, and the walls were no longer the bare, cold cinder blocks that made up the foundation of the house. But a basement was still a basement, and as Andy followed Neal into the room from the stairway, he still recognized the faint, musty smell of subterranean air and mothballs.

“I’ve got all I need here,” Neal said, and Andy couldn’t tell if it was meant as a boast or a defense. Deciding that a returning soldier shouldn’t have to sleep in the same bed he had as a child, Neal’s mother set up the basement of their house for his comfort, though looking around Andy couldn’t find many differences from when it was used as extra storage space. The boxes of Christmas decorations were pushed off to one corner of the room, leaving space for an old pull-out couch, its cushions comfortably squashy but worn. He spied Neal’s guitar case propped up against the arm of the couch, and Andy set his own guitar beside it, freeing the extra weight from his arms.

Neal pointed opposite to the couch, where he had set up what passed for an entertainment center. “Got my stereo,” he noted, the record player’s turntable kept in pristine condition, though the only speakers Neal could afford on a soldier’s stipend were from a secondhand store. Right next to it was a tiny television on wheels, sporting additional coils of tin foil at the end of its rabbit ears; Andy suspected even that didn’t help much in the way of reception. “And a TV, which, in clear weather, I can get Channel 2.”

“The only station you need, really,” Andy joked, and it warmed him to see the smile return to Neal’s face.

“And, my own bathroom.” In the far corner of the room a plywood door stood on new hinges, cordoning off the bathroom that had rarely been used in Andy’s recollection of his visits to Neal’s house, finding the ones aboveground far more hospitable. As Neal swung the door open they both peered inside, the cramped little room holding little but a toilet and a stall shower. The water, though Neal did not let it run, probably came out of the pipes cold. Sandwiched in the corner, taking up most of the space, were two large appliances, tinted avocado green. Andy snickered.

“Complete with washer and dryer, I see,” he noted, and received a slap upside the head for his trouble.

“It’s all I could afford,” Neal admitted. The hand that had playfully struck Andy’s head lingered there, running through the bristles of Andy’s hair and down, finally resting along his shoulders.

“Yeah, free.”

“It’s better than sleeping upstairs,” he said, and Andy did have to admit to himself that a cold, unwelcoming basement was at times preferable to sleeping within earshot of his parents.

Neal’s voice went lower with his hand, trailing in between Andy’s shoulderblades, tracing the rivets of his spine through his t-shirt, before hungrily palming his ass. “And if you remember, I haven’t been sleeping here lately.”

“Also true.” Biting back a moan, Andy relaxed into the touch as he did as he was told and remembered. For nearly every night the past two weeks he had a welcome bedfellow, the pair exploring each other in every way they could, discovering how each man liked to be kissed, touched; what exactly would make them shudder and scream. With all the times he had to make excuses to his mother about laundering his own sheets, Andy concluded that his own washer and dryer would have its advantages.

The hand at his backside moved to his arm, Neal’s touch delicate yet possessive against his skin, and he tapped at Andy’s fist holding his other bundle. “You can throw your bag anywhere,” he indicated towards the overnight duffel in Andy’s grasp, leaning in to purr into to his ear, so close Andy could feel the bite in his words. “‘Cause you sure ain’t gonna need clothes tonight.”

They kissed, Neal’s mouth stifling the sounds unwittingly rising from Andy’s throat. A form of habit, for the both of them: cursed with the thin walls of Andy’s bedroom they had learned how best to hide their pleasure, restricted to silence when together. The basement provided them extra freedom, but they discovered it was hard to adjust. When Andy responded to the kiss, eyes drifting closed, his free arm snaking around Neal’s waist, he realized with a thrilling glee that they did not have to be so quiet that night at all.

“Can’t believe this is what you want,” he mumbled when their lips parted, his hand toying with the waistband of Neal’s pants as Neal nipped a path along Andy’s neck with his teeth. “You’re turning twenty, for Chrissakes...but you’re staying in like an old man...”

Neal rested his forehead on Andy’s shoulder and groaned; Andy frowned, knowing the groan certainly did not come from a place of pleasure. “I have been out _all fucking day_ ,” Neal complained, to which Andy playfully patted him on the back, cooing a patronizing “there, there”. “First my _mom_ wanted to take me out to lunch with the family. Then my _dad_ had to call--long distance so I couldn’t just ignore it. Then _the guys_ insisted they take me out for drinks, their treat--”

“I wasn’t invited to that,” Andy pouted.

Neal looked up from his position on Andy’s shoulder with the hint of a smile. “Then get a better fake ID, young’un.”

Detaching himself from his best friend’s embrace, Neal walked over to the stereo, inspecting the record collection, outdated due to his first tour and destined to be even more after his second. “My birthday’s supposed to be about what I want to do, not what everyone else wants me to do. I get enough of that in the army; I want to make the decisions when I can.” He picked up one album in the collection--Velvet Underground, who most people didn’t get their dark grit, but Neal thought Lou Reed was a fucking genius--and set the record on the turntable, carefully adjusting the needle. “And for the rest of the night, I decided I want to do a whole fuckload of nothing.”

Andy feigned offense as he dropped his duffel down near the couch, its cushions already upended to make room for their bed. “You calling me nothing?”

The middle finger aimed in his direction was the response Andy normally expected from his deadpan brand of sarcasm. But the smile on Neal’s face--affectionate and understanding, and it made warmth spread throughout Andy’s body at just the sight of it--was coming from a different place entirely. Andy didn’t know which he preferred: being the best friend, the one Neal could joke to, play music with, confide in when he needed...or being something more, someone who could make Neal smile like no one else in the world.

He concluded to himself that he liked both, equally, for without one, there’d be no music between them, no songs that spoke of emotions Neal and Andy could only express through the chords of a guitar. And without the other, Andy wouldn’t have that excited flutter in his gut, the anticipation burning from his thighs to his chest over exactly what Neal planned for them this evening.

He plopped down on the couch’s thin mattress when a bright red and green card on Neal’s side table caught his attention. “Christmas card?” he asked, reaching over to examine it, wondering who would have sent one directly to Neal and not to his entire family.

Neal nodded, making his way over to the couch. “Dave’s,” he said; he pointed out David among the figures on the front of the photo card, a cheesy grin plastered on his face, eyes shining and joyous even through the grain of the photograph. The entire Cook family had apparently made a showing for the annual Christmas card portrait, complete with handmade Christmas sweaters of varying colors, designs, and levels of poor taste. David’s sweater--a bright green that certainly did not match his eyes--looked to have a felt snowman knit into the fabric, but it was partially concealed by something black and furry David held in his arms.

“His mom surprised him with a puppy for his birthday,” he explained, the detailed letter David had sent along with the card telling Neal all he needed to know about his friend’s own time away from the army. “Named him Dublin, I think. The fucker went on for pages gushing about him.”

“How is he doing?” Andy asked. Neal had given his fellow soldier an open invitation to visit them in Tulsa, meet Andy; get some real barbecue instead of that slop Missouri tried to peddle as authentic. But David respectfully declined, joking that he’d spent enough time with Neal already, he didn’t want to use his vacation time seeing his face. After reading David’s letter--explaining in ways he could not say in Vietnam why free leave had suddenly become so vital to him--Neal understood he had quite a different reason he wanted to stay with his family in Missouri as long as possible.

“Hanging in there,” he said. “Spending lots of time with his brothers. Don’t know how he does it; I’m about ready to strangle myself staying at home.”

“And that’s with moving down to the basement,” Andy joked, and Neal swiftly reminded him that this was no longer a basement, it was a _bachelor pad_.

Andy had to cover his mouth with his free hand not to laugh in Neal’s face. “Oh, yes,” he played into it, his grin wide behind his palm. “I’m sure you have girls coming in and out of here all the time. Got a line of skirts at your door, leading all the way from your mother’s kitchen.”

Neal laughed, both men fully aware it wasn’t skirts he was chasing these days. Inching his way across the mattress on his hands and knees, he pulled the other man’s hand down from his mouth, eager to see that unobstructed smile. “That’s me. Waist deep in pussy,” he said while still holding onto Andy’s hand, his thumb tracing the creases along his palm.

With that hand Andy pulled him in closer, already anticipating the heat of Neal’s body overtop his. “Beating them off with a stick, I bet.”

Using the arm of the couch to balance himself, Neal hoisted his upper body up, looming over Andy, their lips only inches apart. “Why don’t we put this back over here.” He plucked the Christmas card from Andy’s fingers and set it back down on the table facing down. With what Neal wanted to do with Andy tonight, he didn’t need David Cook’s face grinning back at them.

It was hard to decide where to begin: Neal bore his lips down against Andy’s, feeling the now familiar surge of lust wash over him as they opened to him, inviting his tongue inside. They had the whole night together, the late hours of Neal’s birthday leaving them undisturbed until the morning. Neal had to remember to pace himself, that anything he wanted to do with Andy--or anything Andy wanted to do to him--would have its perfect place and time. But here, lying above Andy, feeling the excitement in his kiss, Neal had to fight the urge to have everything all at once, let the sensations take over and control him.

A slender arm wrapped around Neal’s waist as Andy responded to the kiss, tongue darting out to meet Neal’s. Andy’s other hand found its way up into Neal’s hair, its length given time to grow beyond a messy crew-cut, and his fingers tangled themselves in the locks, tugging gently where they could. It garnered a growling moan from Neal, instinctive and sudden; he had no idea how much he could enjoy that feeling, the sharp pain of pleasure as Andy anchored his head by the grip on his hair, but now that he knew, he’d grow it out until it dragged on the fucking floor.

With a sudden tug Andy broke the kiss, though with his panting, needy breaths on Neal’s face and his eyes still closed, lost in the moment, Neal surmised it had been an inner struggle to do so. “Is the door locked...?” he asked.

Neal found it very difficult to respond when the hand at his waist crept around towards the front of his pants, palming the visible outline of his hard cock. He decided a grunt was good enough for an answer and leaned in hungrily for another kiss, but Andy held him firm. “Neal,” he said, a little sterner this time.

“Let go’a me, and I’ll check,” Neal said bemusedly, reluctant to let Andy release him from his grasp and even more displeased with the fact that he had to be the one to request it. The hands on his body retreated and he pushed himself off the bed, giving one last, long parting look at Andy below him, the look in his eyes ordering Neal to get back to him, and soon. Neal closed the distance between the couch and the door faster than he ever ran from enemy fire.

When he finally checked three times that the lock was secure, Neal turned back towards the couch, eager to return, and saw Andy standing before him. His face was awash with conflict: his teeth bit down insecurely on his bottom lip while his dark brown eyes shone brightly with daring. Neal wanted to reach out to him, kiss him again, but then Andy’s hands went to the collar of his t-shirt, gripping at the fabric and pulling it over his head. Silently it dropped to the floor, and when Andy’s face was in view again that hesitance was gone, and his jaw jutted out in confidence; determination.

Neal’s mouth dropped open and his eyes refused to even blink. “A-Andy...” he whispered as the Andy’s jeans went next, slipping past his hips methodically and down to the basement floor. He stood there naked, dick at half-mast and nearly reaching towards Neal; he could almost see Andy’s heart pounding thunderously in his chest. They had undressed together before, Neal seeing and touching every inch of Andy’s skin in the privacy of the Charger, or during hurried encounters in Andy’s bedroom, when the lights were down and the rest of the house slept. But never had Andy been so defiant, so _proud_ like this, the confidence running through his veins coming through in flashes in those dark eyes. He wanted Neal to see the man he had become, take it all in. As his eyes roamed along Andy’s body, the slender tone of his muscles, skin he had touched, kissed, and places still not yet explored, Neal couldn’t tell which took his breath away more: Andy’s silent challenge, or his body itself, open to him like an offering of love.

He shook his head slightly, in disbelief that this was Andy, and that Andy was his. “You’re fucking gorgeous,” he said in spite of himself, the words tumbling from his mind out his mouth. They weren’t even the right words; “gorgeous” wasn’t even close to describing the scene before him, he didn’t think the proper term had even been invented yet.

That broke Andy’s silent confidence; a straight, proud back curved in self-consciously, and his head ducked, blushing. “Fuck you,” he said, unconvincing, hand coming up to scratch nervously at the back of his neck.

Although Neal’s initial response was to crack a quick-witted joke right back at Andy, telling him he certainly planned to, it would break the reverential mood between them; make Andy blush deeper, turn away even more. More than anything Neal didn’t want that, didn’t dare break this moment, make this something more frivolous than it was. Instead he crossed the space between them with long strides and pulled Andy’s body into an embrace, kissing him fiercely and showing him how much he actually meant it. Hands went to groping one another as Neal clumsily led them both back towards the pull-out couch, stumbling over each other’s feet before collapsing onto the mattress, side by side.

Andy groaned into Neal’s mouth as he tugged on the other man’s shirt, hoisting it up to reveal an inked chest, desperate for more skin. His one moment of self-consciousness was erased from their memories, Neal’s kiss emboldening him to press further, reach out for more. As Neal’s arms pulled him closer in, their bodies flush against one another, Andy hooked one leg around Neal’s hips, feeling the rough scratch of denim against sensitive flesh. Suddenly startled Neal broke their kiss with a strangled moan, his hips bucking into Andy’s on reflex. It was no fair Andy was naked while Neal remained fully clothed, the cock now straining inside his jeans dying to break free; no fucking fair at all.

“Want you,” he said, his breath heavy and labored, hips pulsing on their own accord against Andy’s. “Fucking hell, Andy...”

Out of breath from passion himself, Andy ran a finger along Neal’s bearded jawline, down to the chin, and then against his lips, softly tracing them back and forth, ring to ring. “Take off your clothes,” his voice was low and gritty, and filled with a determination Neal had never heard before. “Wanna watch you.”

Faster than he could blink Neal tore his shirt up over his head, tossing it across the room, where it landed on the covered turntable, jarring the needle. It skipped on one line of a song repeatedly--”I’ll be your mirror//I’ll be your mirror”--until the needle finally surrendered, returning to its rightful groove on the record. His hands flew down to the waistband of his jeans next, but Andy stopped him, a sound of protest in his throat. Silently he guided Neal’s body upright until he was sitting on the edge of the mattress; Neal could guess what he wanted the rest of the way.

Nearly forgetting to breathe, Neal rose to his feet, his mind so focused on the man in his bed, pleasing him in any way Andy wanted. Turning around to face Andy, Neal caught the waiting, hungry look in his eyes, Andy’s mouth dropping open as he sat up to watch. With a flick of a button and the pull of a zipper Neal loosed the pants from his hips, digging his thumbs into the waistband and pulling them down below his knees. It was strangely thrilling to be watched like this, he realized, stepping out of the pants and kicking them out of the way; knowing that Andy was watching him, getting off on every move, every piece of clothing that he shed. A low groan came from Andy’s lips as Neal’s cock sprung free of its confines, erect and begging to be touched.

Neal felt a blush creep up on his own cheeks; now he knew what Andy felt like only a moment before. “Like the view?” he joked, mockingly curving his back and flexing his arms into a Charles Atlas pose; he only got the tiniest of laughs from Andy, his eyes darkened with lust, mind entirely not focused on light conversation. Relaxing the pose, Neal came forward, ready to return to the bed; but once again Andy stopped him, holding out a hand to bar his way, then trailing that hand slowly up and down Neal’s thigh.

When Andy looked up at Neal, eyes wide and full of desire, hand moving up to squeeze against Neal’s hipbone, no words needed to be spoken, no request except for what Neal saw in Andy’s eyes. He knew exactly what he wanted.

With one hand still gripping at Neal’s hip Andy took Neal’s cock in the other, stroking its length and pulling him closer. One more step and Neal crowded into Andy’s space, calves bumping together, the head of Andy’s cock brushing against Neal’s knee; out of impulse it jumped at the contact, leaving behind a wet spot of precome on Neal’s skin. But what he paid attention to was Andy’s hand, his palm squeezing gently on the shaft of Neal’s cock. Neal couldn’t look away from Andy’s face below him, his eyes shining from the dim lights of the basement, locked on Neal’s gaze. They stayed on him even when Andy’s hand guided Neal from the base, fingers digging thick into his pubic hair, and Andy took the head into his mouth.

Neal couldn’t bring himself to stop watching, his chin tucked to his chest, jaw dropped open in lust and shock. Andy sucking him wasn’t new--though this vantage point was a first, and while Neal was enjoying the view he feared his knees would buckle underneath him at an inopportune time--but the boldness of the gesture, the way Andy guided him over, brought him to this, was different and thrilling. It was even more thrilling when Andy dared to take Neal deeper, inching his lips slowly down the shaft, enveloping him in warmth.

“F-fuck,” he stuttered, his hands reaching out towards Andy, able to touch only his head, his face. Fingers traced the other man’s jawline as he opened up his throat, allowing more of Neal’s cock inside, eyes finally closing from the effort. The other hand reached up to Andy’s hair, tugging at the scalp, tighter when Andy suddenly pulled him all the way down his throat in one sweep, lips kissing the gingery hairs at the base. It was almost too fucking unbelievable for Neal’s mind to process; his head rolled back, lips biting back a hard moan, as Andy began to bob himself on his dick, pulling Neal in as far as his mouth would allow.

Another sharp tug at Andy’s hair and Neal’s hips started trembling; Andy held onto them firmly with both hands, fingers digging into the muscle and flesh. A slow, twisting pull of Neal’s hand in Andy’s hair began his request. “Want to...” he managed, finding it shockingly hard to form complete sentences. “Can I...?”

With a long, slow lap of his tongue along the underside, Andy drew away, watching Neal’s cock twitch from his retreat. His gaze met Neal’s once more, and ordered him in a low, throaty voice, enticing Neal even more. “Say it.”

With a moan Neal drew his lips in to wet them, parting them again with new resolve. There was no hesitancy in his voice when he asked, only the direct desire spurred on by Andy’s lips on him, cock down his throat. “Let me fuck your mouth.”

Andy knew it was coming, could see the request in Neal’s eyes before it ever formed on his lips; but to hear it, Neal’s tone forceful yet still asking, still waiting for Andy’s consent, was another thing entirely. He let out a stuttering moan before taking Neal in again, opening himself up as he felt two hands grasp onto his scalp, with Neal’s hips pushing his cock in further.

_Holy fuck..._ Neal’s head dropped back on impulse, his eyes squeezed shut as his hips thrust into Andy’s waiting mouth. The wet heat of Andy’s mouth felt fucking amazing, and the control Neal had just been given overwhelmed his senses, but above all he didn’t want to harm Andy in the process of simply getting off. He rolled his hips forward tortuously slow, feeling a rumbling aching in his gut as Andy’s mouth enveloped him, took his length in deeper.

Andy’s eyes themselves were closed, bracing himself for the unknown, giving his mouth over to Neal in ways he had only considered in his deepest dreams. Now Neal was here, all around him, every sense filled with his presence: he smelled his heady scent against his skin, felt the muscles of Neal’s thighs clench underneath his fingertips with every thrust. It wasn’t easy to relax his jaw like this, fight against the physical impulses of his body and let Neal take control. But he found himself getting more comfortable with it by the moment, enlivened by Neal’s scent, his touch, the way he muttered curses under his breath to stop himself from gasping out embarrassingly...Andy moaned in the back of his throat as one of his hands dropped from Neal’s legs and fell into his lap, stroking his own untended cock.

Soon Neal’s thrusts came faster, the fingers tangled in Andy’s hair gripping tighter; his mind was drifting from concern over being too rough and more on getting deeper, going faster, and then, not even being able to _think_. Taking deep, panting breaths he peered down at his handiwork, Andy’s lips covered in a slick sheen as they wrapped around Neal’s cock, eyes closed tightly to block out the discomfort, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat each time Neal thrust into his mouth. It was a sight to behold and Neal couldn’t even fucking fathom that this was only for him,  because of him, that neither man had ever even felt close to what they experienced together. No one else could be what Andy was to Neal: not the words in his letters, the hands on a guitar, the mouth on his cock and the lips in a treehouse so softly pressed against his.

He wanted to say Andy’s name aloud, feel it on his tongue just as Andy was feeling him, but all that came out was a guttural moan. It reverberated in his body, down his chest and into his legs to the floor; Andy could feel it from the tips of Neal’s fingers, the head of his cock pressing and pulsing at the roof of his mouth. He mirrored the sound deep in his throat, shuddering at how Neal’s dick responded, jerking on its own accord, and how he knew that he was the cause. His muscles ached and his jaw was going to hate him in the morning, but Andy didn’t want to ever stop, he wanted to keep making Neal feel like this--shivering from pleasure, too far gone to even call out his name. If his body would have cooperated and he didn’t have things to do that week, Andy would have wished he could suck cock forever.

The hands at his scalp suddenly went rigid, the muscles of Neal’s thighs trembling; with a sudden surge of realization Andy felt Neal lose his pace and falter. Neal’s cock began to jerk again in his mouth, this time spilling hot and readily on Andy’s tongue and down his throat. He took it all, not daring to detach himself from Neal now; the bitter, salty taste filled his senses, a taste so uniquely Neal, a taste he always wanted to remember. Andy swallowed around his cock, taking down every last drop of Neal, until a whimper rose from above him and he looked up, eyes full of lust and triumph.

Neal could barely think, barely breathe from his climax, shuddering even at the memory of shooting his load into a warm, wet, inviting mouth--Andy’s mouth, who continued who suck him dry, who lovingly held him through the aftershocks and dutifully released him once Neal grew soft between his lips. The fingers tangled into dark, spiky hair softened, cradling Andy’s head, the energy to stand and even fucking _move_ quickly draining from Neal’s body. With a heavy sigh he slowly sank down to his knees, to Andy’s eye level; he had _never_ felt like this before, wave and wave of pleasure washing over him until all his senses were dulled except touch, to receive and to feel.

His lips curving into a smile, Neal pulled Andy in for an exhausted kiss, immediately darting his tongue into Andy’s mouth, tasting heated skin and the remnants of his own come. Andy groaned into his mouth, stuttered and needy, his tongue mingling with Neal’s in a desperate fashion.

When Neal pulled away, his hands traveling down to cup Andy’s face in his palms, he realized why Andy’s kiss was so desperate. Looking down, he saw Andy’s fist enclosed around his own cock, stroking furiously, resorting to bringing himself to release. Neal made an offended noise in his throat; after what Andy had just given him, that wasn’t going to do at all.

“Hey...” Neal said softly first, not expecting his voice to sound so ragged and unused; he cleared his throat and tried again. “Don’t gotta do that,” he assured him, hands moving downward still, one drifting down to touch Andy’s collarbone, his chest, dropping into Andy’s lap to still the hand on his cock. Swatting it away gently, Neal replaced it with his own, feeling the warmth of Andy’s flesh on his fingers as he stroked him. “I’m here...”

Instantly Andy responded to the touch, arching his back, hips nearly lifting up off the mattress. Another urgent whine rose from his throat but Neal quelled it with a kiss, feeling the tension in Andy’s body, aching for more. All Andy could hear in his mind were Neal’s words repeating over again, _I’m here,_ like the first letter he tried to write to Neal, desperate to let him know he cared.

Neal’s lips moved lower along Andy’s skin, against a jawbone, down to the pulse at his neck. He felt it begin to race underneath his touch, and Andy threw his head back, exposing his throat further to Neal, giving him all the space he wanted to explore. Neal did take pride in the marks his nips and bites left behind on Andy’s skin--so overzealous the first time Nick had asked what girl Andy had been so viciously necking with, not noticing the distinctive marks Neal’s lip piercings had left behind. Keeping a slow, rhythmic pace with his hand, he began to kiss lower, making a trail down Andy’s chest.

“Oh God...” Andy whimpered, anticipating what was to come; they had been together long enough now for him to know in the bedroom Neal was anything but subtle. He leaned back on the heels of his hands as Neal’s lips traveled lower on his body, feeling the springs of the thin couch mattress dig into his palms, the pain overpowered by the pleasure of Neal’s touch.

They had been in this position before, in the quiet moments before sunrise in Andy’s bed; the first time Andy had come embarrassingly fast, having never felt something so amazing as Neal’s warm, wet mouth around his dick. He had tried to apologize once he caught his breath and the room stopped spinning, but Neal just laughed, wiping the remnants of Andy from his lips, and resolved that they’d just have to get more practice.

Now, with that promised practice, Andy knew more of what to expect, how it would feel when Neal’s tongue lapped at his crown, when tattooed hands guided his shaft all the way down past his lips, to the base. He was already resting on his elbows when Neal finally reached his crotch, his hips pulsing along with the pace of Neal’s jacking, head back in ecstasy. “Please, Neal,” he stuttered, breath heavy in his lungs, as Neal circumvented his final destination by kissing along the lines of Andy’s hips.

Playfully, Neal bit down on the flesh there, catching Andy’s attention. The spark in his eyes was unmistakable; he wanted to give Andy just as good of an experience as he had just received. “Watch me, and I will,” he promised.

Andy’s head shot up so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash.

His eyes focused just in time to watch Neal sink down onto his dick, lips encircling the head, pulling him into the heat of his mouth. With a shout he should have worried would wake the neighbors Andy thrust up into Neal’s mouth, the sensations intense, his mind reeling. Intent on his goal Neal took him in, inching his way down Andy’s length, one hand steady at the base, thumb sweeping over the velvet-soft skin of Andy’s balls. Neal inhaled the scent of Andy on his fingers, could taste him, heady and real on his tongue, he never wanted to get enough.

It was getting harder--no pun intended, he thought, though it was certainly a true statement--for Andy to focus on individual sensations, the movements of Neal’s lips bobbing up and down his shaft, his tongue toying with the slit every time he pulled away. Everything was crashing together in a barrage of sensation on his mind, the sight of Neal down upon him, the unapologetic slurping sounds his mouth was making, and holy hell, the _feel_... 

Unable to hold his strength any longer, he laid his back flat against the cool sheets, easing the mounting tension in his tired arms and giving himself over completely. Neal might object with him not watching anymore, but one more second like that and it’d be over quicker than Andy’s first time...

He hadn’t even noticed the wandering fingers fondling his balls until Neal had moved them to points south, past sensitive skin to the small hole of Andy’s entrance. Moaning around Andy’s cock and feeling it jolt under his ministrations, Neal felt a sudden thrill from his curious, traveling fingers, realizing there still was a place on Andy’s body he had never touched before. The thoughts soon overtook him, a driving force deep in his gut that compelled him to explore, and he circled the ring with his fingertip, feeling Andy’s entire body shiver above him.

“ _Neal--_ ” Andy cried out, his own reaction so sudden and unexpected even to him. Neal’s hand quickly retreated, that brief encounter all too brief for Andy’s curiosity; daring another look he raised his head, ready to ask why the hell Neal ever stopped. But he watched with wide, lustful eyes as Neal, pulling away from Andy’s cock with an audible smack of his lips, wrapped two fingers around the head and bore down once more, taking it all into his mouth. Andy bit his bottom lip hard, willing the sharp pain to distract him from the pleasure, the sight alone of Neal coating his fingers until they were slick with spit and his own precome more than enough to send him over the edge. He tried to harden himself to the notion, he didn’t dare come now; not when they were so close to what _would_ come.

Pulling back, Neal brought his prepared fingers back to their goal, the rough, calloused pads of his fingertips once again circling the ring. “You want this?” he whispered, his head turning to kiss along Andy’s inner thigh. He searched for consent as much as he aimed to tease; the trembling in Andy’s muscles told him he was ready, but also nervous, scared. “Tell me you want this.”

Andy’s legs opened wider, spreading himself before Neal; he reached down to that thigh Neal so tenderly kissed and gripped it hard, short fingernails digging into his own flesh. “Do it,” he pleaded, with big gulps of air that were making him dizzy. “Neal--fuck--want you so bad--”

He needed no more goading than that. With tentative, experimental strokes Neal slid one finger in, watching with fascination how Andy’s body tightened and tensed in response. He waited until he felt the muscles relax around the digit before he started moving it again, pulling it out slowly before working it back inside to the knuckle, twisting, curving, gauging Andy’s reaction. It was hard for himself to even breathe, feeling the tight heat of Andy’s body around him, molding to his touch. And fuck, this was only Neal’s _finger_ inside him; he couldn’t even imagine how it’d feel if...oh God, if Andy let him put his dick _there_...

Masking a moan at the sudden thought Neal mouthed a trail back from Andy’s thigh to his cock, never stopping the slow thrusting rhythm he kept as he swallowed down the length once more. It was all too much for Andy, Neal all around him, his mouth, his finger, filling and being filled all at once. The prodding intrusion at his entrance was strange but intriguing; it was a feeling he could get used to, he thought, especially when Neal crooked his finger inside him, brushing a sensitive spot that sent Andy’s mind reeling. And when Neal took Andy’s cock into his mouth once more, tongue swirling around the head, the sensations were more than Andy could bear.

With a strangled moan of warning Andy came into Neal’s mouth, his back arched up off the mattress, fingers digging into the sheets, senses completely overblown. The pleasure kept coming in waves as Neal swallowed around Andy’s cock, abandoning his gentle methods and plunging his finger into Andy’s ass, determined to hit that spot over and over again. Feeling Andy flex and contract around him was a world of new experience, for the both of them. Andy shuddered when Neal finally pulled away, finger slipping out of him, the cold basement air hitting his limp cock.

“Holy shit...” he said, gasping in deep breaths, fully laid out on the bed, eyes up to the ceiling. “Neal...fucking amazing...”

“Fuckin’ potty mouth on you, Skib.” Neal grinned as he made his way back onto the bed, using his hands and lips to trace slow paths up from Andy’s hips. He could feel the exhausted, sated laugh as it rippled through Andy’s body, low and lazy. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

When his kisses reached Andy’s face he was greeted with a smile, Andy’s large brown eyes unfocused and heavy-lidded but still, and always, trained on Neal. “No,” he answered, tipping Neal’s chin up and pulling him closer. “But I do suck your cock with it.”

Neal moaned at the recent memory as Andy brought them together for a kiss, putting in as much energy as his weary body would give him. Wrapping his arms around Andy’s slender frame, he pulled him into an affectionate embrace, too soon after their first encounter for a second wind, Andy’s breathing barely back to normal, but the desire to be close to him was still there. They lay there in each other’s arms, with feet dangling off the couch mattress and Neal’s hands hovering just above the cleft in Andy’s ass, listening to the soft buzz of the speakers as the record needle completed its journey.

“Can’t believe...” Neal shook his head, trying to convince himself that what they just did had been real. His hands swooped down the extra inch to palm Andy’s ass, garnering a very pleased growl from the other man’s throat. “That was...I mean...was it good?”

Andy made an offended noise in his throat, as if anyone who imagined that was anything less than mind-blowing should be shot on sight. “You’re a damn idiot,” he said, smiling to temper the words, as Neal gave his ass another squeeze. Leaning in, Andy tucked his face in close to Neal’s, lips perched just above a stretched earlobe. Letting his voice drop low, Andy whispered into his ear, sending shivers through Neal’s entire body. “I blew off in your mouth, shouting your name.” His tongue peeked out between his lips, licking at the metal ring in Neal’s ear, framing his stretched piercing. “Does that tell you if I liked it or not?”

“Mmm...yeah, guess it does...” he murmured happily, the exhaustion of a full day compounding on the weariness in his muscles. Finding the blanket at the corner of the mattress, Neal pulled it over the pair, a sudden sense of warmth coming over him as Andy moved in closer, resting his head on Neal’s shoulder.

“So,” Andy’s voice sounded as heavy as his head felt, a sated, blissful slumber already creeping in. “Has this been a productive birthday? You get to do everything you wanted?”

Neal chuckled into Andy’s hair as he corrected him. “ _Who_.”

“Yeah, yeah...” Andy closed his eyes with the smell of spent sex all around them; he focused on the rise and fall of Neal’s shoulder as he drew breath, the feather-soft way his hands traced patterns on Andy’s back. “Better than dinner with the fam? Drinks with the guys?”

Those gentle hands descended again, finding welcome purchase on a sleepy Andy Skib’s ass. “Definitely.” Andy felt a kiss against his forehead, then the familiar smirk spreading out along the skin. “If we can do it again, it will be.”

***

When Neal awoke the next morning he was greeted by familiar brown eyes and lips curving into a smile. The motherfucker was watching him.

“Creepy, Skib,” he said, barely distinguishable as a deep yawn engulfed the words. They were still entangled together on the pull-out couch, the uncomfortable metal springs poking into Neal’s ribs, but his closeness to Andy’s naked body made it bearable.

Andy’s nose scrunched up reactively. “Your morning breath’s fucking terrible,” he commented; his first words to Neal since waking up, critical and full of sarcasm, and Neal wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Had his brain been more on alert than it currently was--Neal wasn’t a morning person, never was--he would have mentioned that their activities last night didn’t make for cheery, fresh breath in the morning. Instead he opened his mouth as wide as his weariness would allow and yawned derisively in Andy’s face, plastering on a triumphant smirk when he was done.

“God, I hate you,” Andy muttered, dropping his face back onto the pillow to rid himself of the smell. It only made Neal smile wider, as Andy made no move to pull away from their embrace and make good on his claim.

Playfully Neal pulled him in closer, his hands lazily indulging in the feel of Andy’s skin, running his fingers up and down his spine. “S’not even dawn yet, anyway,” he mumbled, his lips finding purchase along the muscles of Andy’s neck, where his breath could do little damage to Andy’s senses but his kisses could do so much more. “Go back to sleep.”

“How can you tell?” Andy looked around the dark basement, shadows filling up every available space. “There are no windows here...”

Neal gave only a grunt in response, slipping halfway back into slumber; when he received a vindictive poke in his side, he understood that it wasn’t a good enough response for Andy. “Internal clock,” he explained; a quality he had drilled into him during basic training, and nailed into his mind permanently during his tour. “Clocks lie; the sun even lies.” He was trained to intuit the hour in case a soldier’s watch failed him, for missions laid out in the blackest of nights. Bryan told him grimly one day it was also helpful if you became a prisoner of war, unconsciously counting the days when all your mind could feel was pain.

The poke at his side smoothed to a gentle touch, Andy’s palm lingering on Neal’s waist. “But you’re late all the time.”

“Yeah, but I know it.”

With a soft chuckle that Neal felt reverberate throughout his body, Andy replied with a kiss to Neal’s hairline and, after tipping his chin up with a free hand, his lips. Apparently Neal’s morning breath wasn’t so horrendous, after all. “No being late today,” he advised; now that Andy was off from school for Christmas, they had scheduled rehearsals every day until the show, fine-tuning their phrasing and making sure their set was flawless. After months of not playing one note of music, Neal wasn’t much aiming for flawless; he would be happy if they weren’t a complete wreck on stage. “I told Kyle ten. If we’re not at my house by then he’ll think we meant ten P.M. and leave.”

“But P.M. sounds _great_ right now...” Shifting his leg, Neal found his thigh positioned in between Andy’s; he moved it subtly against Andy’s crotch and felt the other man stir. There was a lot they could do before ten o’clock rolled around.

Letting the shadows in the dark guide them they kissed, with soft, lazy flicks of a tongue, lips that neither asked nor demanded but simply _were_ , content in their statement. When Andy moved to nip along Neal’s stubbled jaw, Neal remembered what he had seen when he woke up that morning. His best friend wasn’t much of a morning person, either--frequently waking only to be the voice of reason in the pair, to remind Neal they shouldn’t sleep through all of the day--and the behavior confused Neal.

He asked, softly, why Andy had been up that early; he instantly regretted it, as Andy stopped his ministrations on Neal’s skin to answer. “Just thinking,” Andy murmured, brushing his cheek against Neal’s; the stubble was growing softer, he noted to himself, Neal’s attempt at a beard finally coming to fruition.

Neal sighed contentedly at the touch, his voice dropping down to a whisper. “About what?”

A smile played on Andy’s face as he closed his eyes, reveling in the simple, quiet feeling of Neal’s body next to his. “I wish it could stay like this forever.”

Andy didn’t bother him further on getting up in time for rehearsal, and they had ended up reaching the Skib house late--where they found Kyle, blissfully stuffed, at the kitchen table, with a large plate of Andy’s mother’s blueberry pancakes. But the entire day, from when they awoke again after the sunrise and made love, to the rehearsal session that lasted well into the night, the thought was not far from Neal’s mind. He wished, too, that it could have stayed like that, in each other’s arms in that basement where time seemed to escape them. Neal wished he could stay with Andy for as long as he would have him. But he was living in Tulsa on borrowed time, and as much as he hated to think about it, the reality of his free leave’s end bore down on him more each day.

Today was Day Sixteen, and Neal knew this couldn’t last forever.


	13. Chapter 13

Neal had been in firefights in Vietnam, saw enemies and compatriots alike fall in hails of bullets, men get torn up so much from a landmine there wasn’t enough left of them to send home in a doggie bag. He walked through empty fields at the ready, always with the knowledge in the back of his head that his next step could be his last. He had stared fear straight in the eye, and never blinked.

So why was he so fucking _nervous_ over one small show?

Looking out from the wings of the stage at the Flytrap, Neal surveyed the audience in the dim lights; small, yeah, small was definitely the word to categorize this show. The venue itself, borne of an abandoned warehouse, held barely one hundred people with the stage equipment and bar, and from the looks of it the Flytrap hadn’t filled that capacity in quite a while. Neal and Andy had done their best to bring some life to the place, calling in favors, inviting old friends; Neal had even asked if David wanted to take the drive down from Kansas City, maybe try his hand at some backup vocals, but David regrettably replied that his Christmas duties as an uncle had to come first. But even so, the small crowd seemed to only be made up of their family and friends; Neal supposed the empty bar may have been why they landed a show the day after Christmas in the first place.

There was little to no pressure about this concert, no one to impress, no one standing before a tribunal and getting judged on their performance. And still, the butterflies fluttered in Neal’s stomach, so violently he thought they might have been _actual_ insects, and his short fingernails were never far from his teeth. It wasn’t that this was a big show, not in the least; it was that this was their  first show.

His nerves refused to calm, those damn butterflies only getting louder after a few shots of whiskey meant to loosen his fears. Neal even jumped, startled, when another hand came up from behind him, gingerly plucking his fingers away from his gnawing teeth.

“Can’t play for shit with bloody fingertips, Neal,” Andy said softly, making sure his voice wasn’t heard over the act on stage--a musician a few years older than Neal who looked like he had run the Oklahoma bar scene for a while, strumming peaceful songs on an acoustic guitar. In the shadows of the stage’s wings Andy held onto the hand for longer than necessary, fingers brushing against Neal’s palm. He wanted to bring Neal’s fingers to his own lips, soothe them from his abuse, but Kyle had already been giving them confused looks at rehearsals, and that was a conversation no one was looking to have.

“They’re not bloody,” Neal muttered in protest, though he understood Andy’s concern. The truth was Neal would play guitar with broken, bloody stumps if he had to, and both men knew it; nothing would keep Neal from his music, especially not his own gnawing teeth. The government tried as best they could, shipping Neal off half a world away without his guitar, but the passion had still been there, and the talent to build songs in his head and map them out on paper. The war took music away from him and he came back with some of the best songs he had ever written.

Which, Andy had an inkling, was the real reason Neal was suddenly stricken with cold feet. Reaching up, he squeezed Neal’s shoulder reassuringly. “We’re gonna be _great_ ,” he said, smiling; but the moment Neal looked in his eyes he knew the conviction wasn’t there, the smile not reaching the corners of Andy’s eyes, blocked out by his own nerves. They were both fucking wrecks inside, minutes from laying their souls bare on a stage for the first time. But it was Neal’s name on the bill, and besides, Andy was better at hiding his emotions than Neal, who wore them on his sleeve, as stark and striking as his tattoos. The only person Andy could never hide from was Neal.

He gave a grunt in response, and tried to bring his other hand up to his self-effacing teeth, but Andy quickly smacked it away. “Kyle get here yet?” he asked instead, trying to focus his mind on anything but the songs that took residency there, about to be unleashed upon the world.

“He was here twenty minutes ago,” Andy complained, rolling his eyes. “I had to get my dad to convince the bouncer that he was part of the talent so they’d let him in the fucking door.” He heaved a deep sigh, shaking his head. “I swear, he’s fifteen, looks like he’s twelve, and plays like he’s forty-seven. It’s not fair.”

Finally he managed a smile from Neal; Andy’s collected facade was fading, and his frustration felt endearing to Neal. It reminded him he wasn’t in this boat alone. “This would be a lot easier if you were shittin’ bricks, too,” he admitted, voice low in his throat; a conspiracy of just two. 

“If I were,” Andy countered, “Who else would be here to calm your ass down?”

Neal felt like a fool worrying so much over one concert, to play music they had been practicing for weeks, residing in his head for months. But deep in his gut he knew this was more than just a grouping of songs; it was a part of his heart on the paper, in the chords, no one else yet knowing their significance except Andy. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to put that heart on that stage and watch the crowd hate it, see it crushed before his eyes.

“The songs--” he began to explain, but Andy stopped him.

“--Are fucking amazing. I should know, I helped write them.” As the musician on stage announced his final song for the set, Andy turned towards the guitar rack, selecting Neal’s first before his own. “Worry more that I’m gonna forget the damn words up there.”

This time it was Neal’s turn to reassure his best friend. “You won’t; I know you won’t.” The songs were just as important to Andy as they were to Neal; he also lived within the notes, those words he feared he would forget, but Neal knew they meant too much to him to let slip through his memory.

When Andy handed over the guitar to Neal, their fingers brushed, a jolt of emotions connecting through their skin. They held on longer than either needed, Neal’s hand covering Andy’s, the neck of the guitar firm in his grip. “I--” Neal started, his voice thick with sympathy; he tried to swallow the emotions down, that tone would never do if Andy needed him to harmonize that night. “I couldn’t have gotten here without you.”

“Well, yeah,” Andy joked, smirk on his face, trying to keep the tone light and the energy up. “I made the booking for you in the first place.”

The hand covering his squeezed, thumb caressing the skin. “You know what I mean,” Neal said.

Andy swallowed down the lump in his throat, along with the urge to bring Neal in for a kiss. “I know.” The sound of polite yet insistent applause gave them their cue: the musician had finished his set, hastily gathering his own equipment for a change-over. There was no more time for doubt; the untested would soon find their fate on the stage, one way or the other.

Neal finally let go of Andy’s hand and took the guitar offered to him, its heft familiar and comforting, grounding him. Soon Andy had his own guitar in hand and a nervous, excited smile on his face. He stared out at the stage from the wings, spying the two empty barstools at its center, well-known faces barely visible from the lights patiently waiting for the musicians to fill them. It was now, or never.

“They’re gonna love us,” he gave one last nod of confidence to Neal, the adrenaline of performance already drumming in his ears. “Treat us like kings.”

He got a grin in return, and a shake of his best friend’s head; Neal calling him on his bullshit, as always. “Ain’t no kings in Tulsa, Skib.” He watched Andy smile with a guitar in his hand and he could think of nothing else. “Probably not in the whole Midwest.”

Andy’s words were almost drowned out by the sound of applause and cat-calls from the audience, family and friends there to support the young musicians, as they stepped onto the stage and never looked back. “Maybe there should be.”

***

Neal should never have worried. From the moment he walked onto the stage in the Flytrap, seeing the crowd of people waiting for them, for their music, he knew that stage was where he belonged. Adrenaline cold and blue, and fast like lightning, coursed through his veins when he felt the audience’s eyes upon him, heard their expectant applause. When he leaned down to connect his guitar to the amplifier, he swore he heard a high-pitched whistle from the back of the room, unmistakably Nick’s. Neal laughed, shaking his head, and, still bending over, posed his best impression of a Vargas girl; after that, his anxiety was nowhere to be found.

From the very first chord Neal strummed through that amp, the thrill of the music rushed through his blood, the natural instinct of a musician taking over once Kyle counted off on the drum kit behind them. The stage lights burned hot against his fair skin, illuminating his tattoos as his fingers swept across the strings, made his heart race and his palms sweat with vigor. When he began the first song the chord reverberated through the amp and straight through to his bones, feeling every note he played, experiencing the music with his entire body.

  

_Rolling back again, rolling back inside your head_

  

And there was Andy, his voice rolling in, deep and clear like a thick, heady Irish whiskey, the good kind that Neal could never afford. From the moment he began Neal could tell he had been practicing, honing his instrument from a breathy, amateur tone to the voice ringing true on that stage. He sounded so seasoned, mature beyond his years, like he was born to be on that stage, raised in front of a microphone, destined to sing. Every song in their set, Andy was pitch-perfect, even on the rare occasions when he did forget the lyrics, continuing on without flinching like a professional, a star. Only after the song ended did a slight blush dot his cheeks, impish smile creeping up on his face, and he admitted he may have overlooked a few words.

  

_Corrupted in an uncorruptible way_  
Never able to justify goodbye  
‘Cause I don’t want to leave this place again 

  

And those words... Some songs were new, penned during rehearsals when their minds were wired towards creation; some were written while Neal was abroad, forged in his mind, perfected through letters without ever hearing a note. But every word came through clear and real from Andy’s voice, Neal so entranced by the marriage of lights, amps, and the audience to their songs he almost forgot to chime in on harmonies. Andy sang as if he had lived for centuries, gaining the gritty, dark experiences of Neal’s lyrics, knowing the pain as if he had felt it--instead of the teenager he was, his only experience with pain coming from the letters of his best friend.

  

_Stumbling over all this pain_  
Just to find a common place  
You and I, I’ll lock the door  
‘Cause I’m your passenger tonight 

  

But the songs that resonated most with Andy, the ones where vocal skill and technical mastery gave way to imperfect emotion, were written recently, the ink barely dry on the paper, untested and raw. There he saw the layers of Neal’s emotions change, shift from thoughts of the war to something closer to his heart. Songs of late nights kept awake talking, whispered thoughts filling up the space between them; songs on driving with friends, escaping responsibility on ribbons of asphalt, the windows rolled down, wind whipping in their faces.

He saw the brilliance in Neal’s darker works, felt them in every fiber of his body when he sang, wondered how long it would take for Dylan and Ochs to come by and Neal’d give them lessons. But in the quiet, unassuming songs, simple on one level but complex on others, Andy saw more of himself, in style and influence.

  

_Would it be the same  
If I were to say that I want you_

  

As the set played on it felt more like a regular rehearsal, the lights fading from view, obscuring the faces of the crowd. The show’s closeness to the holiday brought back old friends converging on the town: Travis in from Nashville, Jennie from Oklahoma City, even Alexis back from New York on Christmas break. And faces of new friends could be seen scattered throughout the crowd: Monty with a tallboy in his hand, toasting to good company. All fell away when the music played on, transporting Neal and Andy back to the Skibs’ garage, where playing was effortless and stress-free and the music existed only between the two.

But in the back of Neal’s mind he knew it was not like rehearsal at all: it felt easy, effortless, but at the same time that realization crept in, the knowledge that they were sharing these songs with others, with the world. He and Andy felt it in their bones, in their blood, but now so did the rest of the crowd, singing along where they could, the energy radiating from each listener, fueling the music more than their amps ever could. It was what Andy described to him in a letter from so long ago, what he wanted for their music, for the both of them: getting to play their songs for others, on a stage, feeling the electricity of performance and the joy of sharing their words with the world. It may have only been one show, in front of barely one hundred of their closest friends, in a dive bar in the middle of the Midwest, but damn, it was a start, and now that they knew how it felt, they never wanted to let this go.

  

_When you run too far  
Can’t you see what you mean to me?_

  

Neal gave a quick glance across the stage; he had done it often that night, he was quite aware, for technical purposes, searching for Andy’s cues, waiting to keep their guitars in sync. But this time his only motivation was to look, taking in the sight of Andy bathed in the blue-white stage lights, singing Neal’s words, the songs they wrote together. His voice was low, raspy, and true, perfected and ready for this show, this moment. Andy played to the crowd, unable to hide his excited grin behind his microphone, exploring the limits of his range on their last chorus, their last song.

  

_Forward on, we march with solace  
In knowing that we’ll never be alone_

  

When his gaze returned to the audience Andy’s turned to him, a routine check on his musical partner meaning so much more. He watched as Neal became engrossed in a solo, blue eyes closed, lower lip curled underneath his teeth. His tattooed fingers seemed to fly along the strings of the guitar, much more at home on the neck of his well cared-for beauty than on a gun. Neal played like he never left, the music flowing through his body, more instinctive and natural than speaking, than breathing. He never _should_ have left, Andy thought, seeing the doubts Neal had rise up and float away on guitar sweeps, dissipate in the smoky air of the Flytrap.

Their guitars came together for the last chords of the song, Andy’s rhythmic chords keeping in step with Neal’s masterful lead. The crowd cheered, goading them on, the encouraging din mixing with their music, harmonizing with it. In a brief moment they locked eyes, the air charged all around them with sweat and nerve, the music that took months and miles to craft, and they both knew in their hearts this was the greatest moment of their lives.

  

***

  

“Holy fuck, we’re awesome.”

Even in the dim, red glare of the darkroom light, Neal could see the energy of the photograph jump off the page, instantly bringing him back to that night, that moment. Unwittingly he found himself reaching out towards the print in its cold water bath, seeking to see it more clearly without the waves of water rushing over its surface. But he received a firm smack on his wrist from a pair of wooden tongs, which then shook menacingly in his face.

“Don’t touch!” Andy warned; the photograph hadn’t fully set yet, and try as he might, Neal had no head for the intricacies of photo development. “That’s Lexie’s.”

Feigning injury, Neal rubbed the offending wrist, sporting a frown. “It’s me in the picture,” he argued, but his best friend would hear nothing about it.

“You know the rules.” Alexis had made it clear to Andy when she bequeathed him the darkroom she built in the guest bathroom: she was still free to use it whenever she came home for the holidays, and Andy was merely a tenant. “Don’t fuck with an artist’s work. She didn’t come into my room and tool around on your guitar all year.”

Neal’s lip sneered at the thought of someone handling his guitar--someone other than Andy. “She better not.” But even so, he understood the sentiment: he was a guest in that darkroom, in a world of expression far different from what he mastered. The boxy enlarger was far bulkier than a guitar, the intricate settings focusing on time and light, not pitch and meter, and the only chemicals Neal used to make music were the beers he drank.

And yet Andy transitioned seamlessly from the world of sound to creating visions and images, his presence as welcome developing photos from the concert as it was on the stage. Neal tried to tell him this once--the first time he came into the darkroom, silent and dark, photos filling the room--but Andy shrugged off the praise, claiming that while his sister was a photographer, he just took lots of pictures. Remembering that his best friend rarely accepted credit where it was due, Neal left the topic alone, admiring silently, and focusing instead on the talents they both were proud of.

“Wow.” This time his eyes scanned the room and Alexis’s works lined the walls, photographs set on strings threading throughout the room like clotheslines, the product of mad rushes of inspiration before leaving again for New York. The bulk were photographs of himself--he and Andy, a million moments captured on that one night after Christmas, microphones at their lips, guitars in their hands. Neal couldn’t tell which one he loved more: Alexis’s view from the audience, the eager musicians sharing their songs, their hearts, with the world; or the view from the stage, looking out onto the faces of family and friends, a sight that only existed within Neal’s memory.

He pointed one photo out to Andy, the image particularly crisp, of him singing into the microphone, Andy’s expressive eyes looking out to the unseen audience, staring right back at the lens. “A lot clearer than the concert photos you sent me, Skib,” Neal joked, recalling the set of pictures Andy mailed to him while he was in-country, band members of the Who scuttling around like brightly-clothed insects on a faraway stage. He kept those, just as he had kept all the other photographs Andy sent to him, in a stack with his letters in a carefully guarded space in his basement, Andy’s bemused portrait sporting a middle finger from the same day right at the top.

That same finger came up to greet Neal, a smirk on Andy’s face. “Yeah, well, Lexie was a little closer to the stage than I was,” he contended, getting a good look at his sister’s handiwork as it dried on the line. “And the Who plays at venues a _little_ larger than the Flytrap.”

“No excuse,” Neal said. “You wanted me to get the full concert experience, this is it.”

Andy rolled his eyes as he turned back to the enlarger, a strip of his own negatives nestled in the slide. “ _Sorry_ I sent you such sub-par pictures, Neal.” He snickered. “I’ll remember next time to never send you them again--”

“Hey,” this time Neal protested, taking Andy’s wrist and spinning him to face him. “That’s not what I meant.” Even in the dark, red-tinged light Neal could see the smile creeping up on Andy’s face; Neal’s overreaction said far more than Andy’s empty threat. He matched the smile, his hand coming down to meet Andy’s, fingers entwining. “You know I loved getting those pictures, and all the others, too. Even if they were real shitty.”

It was a roundabout compliment, but at least a well-intentioned one; Andy laughed, knowing Neal’s words came from a place of affection. If not, he would have been kicked out of that darkroom a long time ago. “I can give you more,” he offered; he had reams of negatives from the past few months, Neal could have his choice of prints if he truly wanted.

But innocuous photographs of the Tulsa cityscape and drunken candids weren’t high on Neal’s priority list. “Can I have these?” he asked, pointing again to the photographs of the concert lining the walls, his eyes and smile wide with excitement.

He didn’t even have to see Neal’s smile to know it was plastered on his face; Andy could hear it in his tone, feel the energy radiating from his body. “You’d have to ask Lexie, they’re her negatives,” he said. “But I’m sure she’d let me make a few copies.” His face went sour when he saw the photograph Neal was most drawn to, head titled up, neck growing stiff just to stare. Alexis had caught her brother on a prolonged high note, his face strained, muscles taut, mouth open wide in a silent song. “Oh, Neal,” he chides, groaning. “Not that one, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“What? I think it’s great.” Neal’s gaze went from the photograph to the genuine article in front of him, and then back again. “Reminds me of how big your mouth can actually get.”

“Perfect, don’t forget to tell Lex that when you ask her for it,” Andy muttered sarcastically. As his eyes rolled dramatically they flit upon another photograph that caught his attention. “What about this one?” The opposite of crisp and clear, it showed Neal in flux during a solo, his stony face of concentration in contrast with the motion of his fingers, rendered no more than sliding blurs along the guitar strings. It felt kinetic and alive to Andy, a photograph that poured out music from the page, exemplified what playing with Neal on the stage was all about.

Neal, however, did not share the same sentiment. “Come on, I’m not that fucking narcissistic,” he scoffed. It was a good photograph, regardless, but if he taped a picture of himself over his cot in base he’d never hear the end of it.

Then their eyes lit upon one photograph at the same time, catching both of their attentions: one of the few pictures of both Neal and Andy in the collection, Alexis found a rare moment on film, both musicians deep in their element. One of the brief times in between songs, Andy had just finished addressing the crowd, thanking them for coming out so closely following a holiday to see them perform, and Neal, with a smirk on his face, made a snide remark only Andy could hear. The result was a photo, and a moment, etched in their memories: looking over to one another, the smiles on their faces wide and true, laughing at a joke only they could hear or understand. The crowd in front of them, and even Kyle in the background, faded away, the two musicians the only ones in focus, the only ones that mattered to one another in that moment.

“That one,” Neal said, his voice hushed and reverent, and Andy did not, would not, protest.

They marked down the request on Alexis’s prints, their memories effectively taking them back to that night every time they looked at that photograph, the joke forgotten but the sensations within them always. Feeling like they had nothing to lose and unsure if they’d ever get a chance again, they played every finished song written over the past year, polishing the rough edges where needed, showing the crowd the evolution from a few notes scrawled on military grade paper to a completed song. There were even a few covers peppered into the set: a Beatles song Andy’s voice smoothed over like summer rain, a new Creedence song Neal wasn’t very familiar with but he improvised well, boasting he could bullshit his way through any song if he were drunk enough.

But there was one song both men agreed wouldn’t hit the stage: the first song Neal had sent to Andy after he was drafted, the first one he played again from memory when he returned. The music would have been perfect for the show, a soft, intimate duet between two guitars; but there were no lyrics, none that had yet come to mind to Andy and Neal, and the song felt unfinished somehow. The pair had made the decision to keep that song their own until it was complete, and not to rush the natural inspiration; and later, in the privacy of their bed, they decided to keep it _theirs_ until it was ready, the song so close to their hearts it’d pain them for others not to see it the same.

Once Andy returned to the enlarger, putting finishing touches on prints of his own, Neal, tempting fate that Alexis wouldn’t return for a while, snaked an arm around Andy’s waist, then the other, embracing him from behind. He watched, head perched on Andy’s shoulder, as Andy placed the photographic paper onto the frame, carefully double-checking the exposure settings and timer before setting off the enlarger. For a few brief seconds their own inverted image stared back at them through the enlarger’s bulb lamp, a photograph Andy took one afternoon, holding the camera at arm’s length to get them both into the shot. Their faces were serious and stony, eyes narrowed, lips curved into intimidating frowns, but the camera looked deeper than their posed expressions to something more. Soft smiles played on their real faces as they waited for the timer to click off, shuttering the enlarger, the photograph all but ready for print.

Neal gave a gentle squeeze as Andy leaned into his touch, cheek against cheek. “Yeah,” he concluded, eyes closing in contentment. “We’re fucking awesome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from this chapter are from the songs "Make Me," "Waterside," "Passenger," "Room For Two," and "Circles Anthem," all by MWK. You can purchase any of these songs [here](http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/MWK).


	14. Chapter 14

The days passed, falling into a familiar lull of contentment between the holidays, Neal feeling oddly comfortable and at home doing absolutely nothing. The past few weeks were a welcome change, finding Tulsa figuratively and quite literally a world away from firefights and deadly conflict, Neal finding peaceful joy in the normal, mundane life he had loathed less than a year ago. He knew in his conscience there was more to it than a renewed love of milkshakes and television, of the convenience Midwestern America had to offer; there was more he yearned for in a secret smile, a touch, a kiss, than he could ever get in a fucking milkshake. But his base reason for the free leave was, and always would be, getting the hell out of a war zone; everything else that had come with it was a much appreciated, but added, benefit.

Soon, however, even that would disappear.

As each day brought the plain happiness a quiet December morning could muster, they also brought with them the small reminders, tiny chinks turning armor into rubble, that Neal’s free leave was almost over. The day after their show at the Flytrap, hungover and exhausted but still coasting from the high of performance, Neal and Andy were approached by the bar’s manager as they carted their equipment home. He wanted to book them for another gig--a real gig, one that paid money, one they wouldn’t have to blackmail their friends to fill the room--but he’d only have space available in February, long after Neal would be deployed. He had one, tiny taste of the lights, the music, how amazing it was to play his songs for a crowd, and now it was all snatched up from under him. Even worse, Neal had to be the one to turn the offer down, a lump growing in his throat, as if his body refused to let him form the words.

He dealt with his impending redeployment in the only way Neal knew how: avoid the topic altogether. When talk of his inevitable departure came up, his jaw would lock into a permanent sneer, the distaste for the topic almost palpable. His mother chalked it up to the last shreds of teenage rebellion in him, and suspected it would die down with the next tattoo; his friends dubbed him surly company, reminding him this day was always on the horizon, spoken like men who would never see it.

There was only one person in Tulsa who sympathized, said nothing against Neal’s newly bristled demeanor, because the looming end of the month nearly hit him just as hard. But where Neal kept stubbornly silent against all mentions of the war and his part in it, Andy grew unusually vocal, changing the topic abruptly in polite company, and making his point more strongly with others, tossing out vindictive grumbles against the war, the voice to Neal’s silent resentment. The war that dominated the thoughts of their friends was off-limits, but if they insisted on talking about it, oh, Andy would make sure he was heard.

In the moments reserved for only the pair--the nights tangled together in passion, the mornings awakening in each other’s arms--they never spoke of what was to come, not even as the days could be counted on one hand. Armed with more knowledge the second time around, they knew there would be letters, and mementos, and songs to write between them. But something else tugged deep in their chests, made them hold on a little tighter, longer; told them they both knew this wouldn’t feel like the first time, not at all.

While the world celebrated New Year’s Eve, bracing themselves with liquor and party favors for the annual countdown, to Andy and Neal it was Day Twenty-Five, to a more dire countdown all their own.

“Not for nothin’, and you know I mean no offense--” everyone at the party already knew that when Nick said these words, there was a high probability something offensive would come out of his mouth-- “But 1968? Fucking sucked balls, man.”

He took a long swig of his tallboy as the rest of the men gathered at the party awaited his explanation; Nick was always fond of dramatic suspense anywhere he could get it. It was an intimate party of only a dozen or so of Nick’s closest friends, sharing beers and laughs in his cabin-like house on the outskirts of town. Andy loved the seclusion of the place, far away from the streetlights of downtown Tulsa that streamed into his own bedroom window, a home where the stars seemed to surround you from the heavens, you could reach up and pluck one like apples on the vine. Neal reveled in the cold country feel of the land, taking extra cigarette breaks out on the deck even though Nick allowed smoke in the house, watching the champagne cool in a natural ice bucket by the door.

Nick set the tallboy down hard on the table, accenting his point. “Ain’t no good come out of this year,” he said; some of the guys nodded in agreement, with Phil, a friend of Nick’s who jumped the pond for business, raised his glass and pronounced “Here, here”. “King shot, then Kennedy; President fuckin’ Nixon, that’s a joke--”

“Everyone ran outta bullets before they could get to him,” Josh chimed in, and the rest of the crowd laughed.

“Hey now,” Andy said, his deadpan tone already sending Nick into chuckles. “Let’s not forget, Elvis is back.” Still gripping his own beer, he waved his hands dramatically in Nick’s face, mocking the flamboyant glamor with which the musician had so recently returned. He got a smack on the wrist in return, Nick barely keeping in his giggles as he warned him not to insult the King.

Neal, giving a wry, grim smile, spoke up once the laughter died down and Nick stopped threatening to shake his hips like he was on Ed Sullivan. “I wouldn’t know,” he shrugged; the group grew quiet, suddenly remembering not all of their number had been around at the time to joke. Any hint of amusement on Andy’s face was wiped clean, his mouth going dry; he downed the rest of his beer to quench it but was only left with an unsettling feeling in his stomach.

Raising his bottle to Neal, Nick gave him quite a different reaction. “And perhaps the shittiest thing of all to come from 1968,” he said, “It took some great friends from our midst.” Everyone gave him a reverential, almost wary stare; Neal’s year had been worlds apart from anyone else at that party, the everyday experiences of music and school and alcohol, and hell even politics, so distant from the rifles and mines that had filled Neal’s world. His presence at New Year’s was an elephant in the room, silently reminding everyone that this war was real, and Neal was the first man among them to come back alive.

“It was a long, rough time without you here, Tiemann.” Nick rose from his seat and moved over towards Neal, placing his palms on each of Neal’s shoulders. The air grew unusually dense with silence; Josh coughed and he thought he would choke on it. Andy’s gaze met Neal’s, not bold or drunk enough yet to risk holding his hand underneath the table. “Takes a lot of damn courage to go out there and fight; hell, don’t think I could do it even if I wanted.”

“Nothing brave about it,” Neal mumbled; he broke his stare with Andy, eyes falling to the bottle in his hands. No one asked him to elaborate; Neal suspected they wanted to stay as far away from the mindset of a soldier as they could. The less they understood, the lighter the guilt weighed upon their shoulders.

“But you’re here now, that’s what matters, right?” Josh said, hugging his beer. He had probably had a few too many, too much to last until midnight; Andy silently vowed he wouldn’t be the one to hold Josh’s head up in the toilet when the need arose. “Here for the new year.”

“A much better year!” Nick’s spirits were revitalized, and he slapped his palms against Neal’s shoulders, the awkward silence in his mind passing if he spoke enough. He headed towards the refrigerator and handed out another round. “1969’s gonna kick the teeth outta 1968, just you watch.”

Andy doubted Nick’s self-proclaimed clairvoyance; he narrowed his eyes as Nick handed him another tallboy--his last before the champagne, he didn’t want to be the one with his head in the toilet, after all. “What’s so great about ‘69?” he asked.

Finding his own seat once again, Nick pointed his finger at Andy, clicking his thumb as if cocking an imaginary barrel. “69 is always great, Skibadoodle,” he said with a wink. Neal nearly choked on his tallboy from laughing.

“A lot can happen in a year,” Phil said, the foreign British accent rising above the sounds of Neal sputtering. “Year ago, I was still pissing my life away in Hull, desperate to get discovered, trying to be the next Donovan.”

“Please, don’t bring up Donovan,” Andy groaned.

“And now you’re in the good ol’ U-S of A,” Nick leaned forward and tapped his bottle to Phil’s, the amber glass tinkling as it made contact. “Trying to be the next Merle.”

Phil laughed. “I’m shooting for the next Elvis.”

Nick pointed his drink back in Andy’s direction. “You’ll finally get the hell outta high school,” he noted. After the Christmas vacation ended Andy would be in the home stretch of his senior year, a semester notorious for including the minimal amount of schoolwork and requiring barely a heartbeat to accomplish. Andy scoffed, the diploma not meaning much to him these days. “And we’ll all finally stop feeling like we’re corrupting the youth with you around.”

“Definitely corrupting the youth,” Neal said beside him, voice low, a drawn-out, dirty smile curved around his lips. Andy’s eyebrows rose, startled by the boldness of the remark in front of the others, but no one seemed to notice, too invested in drink or in Nick holding court in his dining room. The leg that surreptitiously brushed against Andy’s under the table, Neal shifting until they were touching knee to calf, was also thankfully overlooked by the rest of the party.

Andy swallowed, hard, finding it harder to compose himself with the beer running through his system and the thought of Neal touching other parts of him under the table. “I’ll bring Kyle along next time,” he said, a warning with a smile. “Might need to give him his whiskey in a sippy cup.”

“Hey,” Josh called out from the living room, crouched in front of the television. He had put it upon himself to turn to CBS, making sure the party didn’t completely derail and they miss the New Year’s festivities. “Don’t fuck with the drummer!”

“That’s right,” Nick agreed with the bout of percussionist solidarity. “You’ll need him. Especially with the way y’all are gonna blow up on the music scene this year.”

Now Andy was certainly doubting Nick’s predictions for the future, and he wasn’t alone. “Oh, come on,” Neal slammed his tallboy down on the table, harder than he expected; the dull thud echoed through the house, startling even Josh, fiddling with the knobs on the TV. “Get the fuck off it, Nick. It was one show, and Andy nearly had to pay the guy to let us on the stage.”

“Yeah, but you killed at that one show. The Flytrap’s small but it’s a trendsetter, other bars pay attention to the acts they book.”

“It won’t happen,” Neal argued, his jaw already clenching, his eyes already cast to the floor. Andy’s eyes shifted towards his best friend, noticing the bite in his tone, the stiffness in his joints. 

“It _can’t_ happen,” Andy said sadly, his voice much softer than Neal’s. He felt his chest tighten as he told Nick and the others about the offer from the manager of the Flytrap, how the start of what could have been a foothold in local music, hell even a career, must be sidelined for Neal’s redeployment. Numbly Andy picked at the label on his beer bottle, desperate to take his mind off the words tumbling out of his mouth; when he was done the room was quiet, the label in tatters.

“That’s rough,” Josh said after a silence, no one quite sure how to continue on with the festivities. The coming year didn’t look to be as promising as Nick had described.

“Shame,” chimed in Phil, gripping his bottle a little tighter and thanking the powers that be the queen had no interest in America’s war.

Resigned, Neal shrugged; there wasn’t much more he could do. “S’not like I didn’t know it was coming.”

Andy’s voice creaked like an old staircase, like he’d been crying but his face was dry. “Doesn’t make it any easier,” he said.

Once again Nick raised his bottle in salute to Neal, this time more solemn, a sign of respect, not celebration. “You are one fucking hell of a guy, Neal. Uncle Sam don’t realize what he’s got.” Using his powers as the host of the party, Nick called on the rest of his guests to raise their glasses in turn, even the empty ones; Josh came in from the living room, where the television was keenly focused on a crystal ball a thousand miles away.

“To Neal,” he toasted, his voice rising above Guy Lombardo’s from the TV. “For fighting for our freedom, though fuck if he actually wants to. Fuck if that’s actually what he’s _doing_ over there. You risk your ass every damn day out there, and you showed those motherfuckers what an American boy’s made of.”

All the eyes at the party were trained on Neal, making him uncomfortable, as if Nick’s words weren’t enough to do it to him in the first place. Neal didn’t regard himself as a hero, didn’t want anyone else faking the claim for him; he would have traded the past year with any one of them, remaining in Tulsa, cowardly but safe, and alive. “You got back in one piece last time, boy, and you’ll damn do it again.”

A chorus of voices rose to repeat Nick’s toast but Neal stopped them. “Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Not to me.” Raising his own bottle this time, Neal provided the solemn alternative; he wasn’t just being humble, the others realized, he was being damn truthful. “To the men still out there, the ones who never left.” He paused to swallow down a lump of guilt in his throat, thinking of the ones who would never make it back. “To Bryan.”

It was the one name that brought a hush to the party, and Neal looked Nick square in the eye, his head held high, gaze even. He wouldn’t back down from his dedication and no one would ever ask it of him. Neal’s group of friends had celebrated his return, but there was one of their number still out in Vietnam, fighting diligently, steeling himself to war and returning only when his mission was done.

With a solemn nod Nick granted him this, and they touched bottles across the table, raising a respectful glass to Bryan Jewett, wherever his boots may find him that night. “To Bryan.”

The quiet that descended upon the party felt awkward, misplaced, like a mournful moment of silence for someone who wasn’t yet dead. Josh spoke up with a drunken cough, a clearing of his throat, anything to shy away from the silence. “And then there are the ones who have yet to face leaving,” he said. Downing the last of his tallboy he stumbled back into the living room; he left the subject of his observation unsaid, but everyone’s gaze slowly turned to the only one to whom it would refer.

“That...that’s not for a while,” Andy said, trying to keep the heat off of him, regretting that he had shredded his bottle’s label before and now left his hands empty. Nick had mentioned Andy would be out of school in 1969, but it also meant he would turn eighteen in November; no longer considered a child, no longer protected from the draft.

Nick shrugged as if they were talking about the inevitability of the weather; that, no matter how many storms you may dodge, in Oklahoma you always encountered a twister sooner or later. “Eighteen,” he said, reclining in his chair, hands resting behind his head. “We all had to face it. You get to drink, get to fuck...” Andy wanted to point out, rather rudely, that it’s just another fucking birthday and he does all of those things anyway. But his neck grew hot underneath his collar at the memory of how he did such things, and thought it was best he didn’t raise any questions from the peanut gallery. “...And you get to fight.”

Andy’s eyes fell, finding the grain on the wooden kitchen table intensely striking. “You say it like I got a choice.”

“Nah,” Nick waved him off. “You just need a story. Sometimes not even a good one.” He called out to the living room, where Josh had disappeared behind a couch, only the top of his head visible above the cushions. “Like Mister fucking Center over there, who got himself an easy, cushy war-proof job--”

“I am an _educator,_ ” Josh countered, a middle finger aimed at Nick peeking over the couch. “I enlighten children to the world of music.”

“You teach third graders ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ on the freakin’ clarinet,” Nick laughed.

“Oh, and what’s your excuse, then, Gibson?” A smiling Phil asked, nudging the leg of Nick’s chair with his foot. He sang a quick Phil Ochs line, the Brit unaware his songs were not thought of kindly by the salt of the earth people of Oklahoma. “Think of my career, my sweetheart dear, my poor old invalid aunt?”

Nick corrected him while chuckling over the accuracy of Phil’s statement. “Poor old invalid grandma. She’s lived a long, hard life, she deserves to be taken care of when she needs it; and better her grandson than some old folks’ home.”

Phil looked around quickly at the group of rowdy, drunken young men taking over an elderly woman’s home. “Where is she, then?”

“Poker game,” Nick said casually; his grandmother might have been old, but she was Gibson stock, centuries of her ancestors born and buried on the land right underneath her cabin. If she ever caught Nick calling her invalid she would’ve popped him one square in the mouth. “Probably be home ‘round three; later if she’s winning.”

The rest of the party laughed, the room filling with the sounds of chatter and beer bottles clinking, the atmosphere returning to something resembling a party. Even in the patriotic small towns of the Midwest, where young boys bled apple pie from their veins and were weaned on the war legacies of their fathers and grandfathers, the weariness of this war was taking its toll. Men walked into the draft boards with stories in hand, excuses to keep them exempt from combat: doctors’ notes that were doctored themselves, hardship notices, college tuition bills. Out near the coasts they called it dodging, and conscientious objectors wore the moniker with pride; but here in Tulsa, you were just a poor sap who had to take care of his grandma.

Every man at that party knew the rules well: dodgers were cowards. But at least they were alive.

The heat was off of Andy and the question remained unanswered; Josh called the others into the livingroom with five minutes left in 1968, and all talk of the war, the draft, and Andy facing either of them vanished. He was about to join the party when he heard a mumble from beside him, Neal surreptitiously excusing himself to the deck for a smoke. The dullness in his blue eyes, and how he grew so tight-lipped and closed ever since Nick breached the topic, told Andy he wasn’t just going out there for a cigarette.

He followed him outside, the sliding door noisily marking his entrance. Neal stared out into the blackness of the winter woods behind Nick’s house, turning away from the raucous crowd inside and preferring the silence of the night. The Tulsa winter wind stung at his bare knuckles but it was comforting; the nights spent on patrol in country were nearly hot and humid as the days, the air sticking to Neal’s skin like spiderwebs. He relished in the cold here, how his skin prickled, his body shivered; he wanted to immerse himself in the cold before it was too late.

Even without meeting his eyes Neal knew Andy was watching him, the smoke from his cigarette encircling his frame, the deck’s floodlights casting his face in an eerie orange glow. Eyes narrowing, his gaze never wavered off the darkness, imagining field mice hiding in the unkempt prairie grass, a family of foxes, maybe some deer, and wondering if it would be the last time he’d look out to an unseen land and believed there were only animals there.

Once the door shut behind Andy they made no sounds, all silent but for the muffled party waging inside. They didn’t have to speak to get their point across; it was something they built gradually in their bones, an unexplainable sense of what the other was thinking, feeling, without ever uttering a word. Andy could watch the nervous flick of Neal’s fingers as he shrugged off the ashes of his cigarette and read a story behind them; Neal only need see the hesitant shuffle of Andy’s feet as he approached to know what he was about to say.

“We can get outta here, if you want.”

Any other person on this Earth and Neal would’ve protested, argued that he was having a great time, he just needed some fresh air laced with tobacco in his lungs. His gaze dropped to the deck floor, watching a lone spider make its way through the wooden slats by his boots, until a pair of worn Chuck Taylors came up before them, standing toe-to-toe.

Neal sighed, a funnel of thin blue smoke escaping his lips. There had been so much going through his mind at that table, a strange, rare look at what his friends thought of the soldiers, of what they could have been if not for good fortune and good excuses. But what stuck out in his memory was Andy’s face when his own fate was discussed, how he listened intently when Nick and the others told their tales of the draft, soaking it up like a bedtime story. They all found ways to avoid the war, some clever, some false, ignoring the fact that Neal was the only man at that table who had not.

“It’s different there,” he said; the spider spun a thin thread, barely thicker than air, and dangled it between two slats, connecting them. “We joke and shit out there; you’re too serious and you go fucking insane. But this...isn’t something you joke about.” He shook his head, recalling the stories of other soldiers he had met in the field, too slow, too sad, or too honest to get out of this fate. “‘Cause you know that for every fucker who faked a med report and left the draft board scot-free...there’s three guys you just saw get their guts shot out from inside them.”

He ran a frustrated hand through his growing hair; this wasn’t how he wanted the night to go, not at all. Not when it was Day Twenty-Five and he only had so many moments left to drink with the guys, to laugh, and to look into Andy’s eyes. “They don’t...they don’t get it.”

“I get it,” Andy was quick to point out.

Neal’s head shot up, eyes finally reconnecting with Andy’s. “Do you?”

When their eyes met Andy saw something in Neal’s he had never experienced before: doubt. His mouth went dry despite all the beer he had that night; he had no way to prove to Neal, to show him that he understood what his best friend was going through. He had never gone to war; never faced an enemy down and had to make the first deadly move. Andy didn’t even know if he could understand what triggered Neal’s short temper at the party, not without going through what he had in the past year. But when he looked into Neal’s eyes--wizened by age, hardened by experience, softened by emotion and Andy’s presence--Andy knew, more than anything, he wanted to try.

Neal shook his head again, harder this time, trying to wrest the negative thoughts from his brain, let them tumble right out of his ears. “I’m sorry, I’m being a dick,” he mumbled the apology while stubbing out his cigarette on the deck’s railing. With a clear line of sight from the deck through the kitchen, Neal could see the rest of the party gathered around the television in the livingroom, watching the countdown with drunken excitement. He pushed himself off the railing, begrudgingly plastering on a smile. “Let’s go back in--”

A hand at his wrist stopped him from reaching for the sliding door. Andy’s brow furrowed with sympathy; he didn’t want Neal to just go through the motions, go along with the rest of the party because he thought Andy did. “We’ve made an appearance,” he reasoned, his hand’s grip on Neal softening along with his voice. “You want to leave, we don’t have to stick around.”

He met with an obstinate Neal, refusing to be the one out of the pair to suggest they leave early, even a few seconds before midnight. “If you want me to stay, I’ll stay,” he said.

The look Neal received in turn was forlorn; if only, Andy thought wistfully, Neal could make that promise for something else.

The countdown in the livingroom grew louder now; Neal and Andy could hear clearly through the door that the year was in its last throes, the numbers getting smaller every second. Andy’s hand slid down from its grasp on Neal’s wrist and went to his palm instead, fingertips gingerly brushing against the skin. Neither one of them moved to the door and break the soothing silence outside, break their touch. When their eyes locked the words between them were forgotten, the whole world nothing but background noise as they stood there, hands linked, the cold embracing them like an old friend.

“5...4...3...2...”

Their year had not gone as either man had expected, beginning in uncertainty and separation, ending in reunion, in finally being together in every sense of the word. Even with a world and a war cleaving their friendship in two, they learned that, through their letters, their songs, no force could keep them apart. And now, with new discoveries about themselves, about each other, they faced the challenge renewed, armed with sensations and emotions that would make separation both insignificant and unbearable.

“1!”

Andy’s eyes never left Neal’s as he squeezed his hand ever so slightly, but Neal felt it all the same. “Happy New Year, Neal,” he said, the tiniest of smiles gracing his lips, reserving all of the emotion so evident in his eyes.

It coaxed out the smile on Neal’s face, small at first but growing quickly into an unadulterated, affectionate grin. “Happy New Year, Andy.”

They returned to the party with renewed spirits, welcomed back to the fold without so much as a sideways glance questioning why they had gone. Though the party waged on long into the night and past dawn--long after Andy and Neal made a flimsy excuse to leave, long after Nick’s grandmother came back forty dollars richer and more tanked than any of her grandson’s guests--they always shared that one moment together, two best friends on a freezing deck, welcoming the new year and all that may come with it.


	15. Chapter 15

In the Charger the heat was set on high, funnels of hot air pumping through the vents, making the atmosphere more resemble a tropical greenhouse than a bitterly cold Midwestern night. It had grown less reliable by the day since Neal had returned, with near-scalding blasts of heat followed by sputtering motors and days of dead, silent cold. He hadn’t bothered to get it fixed; if he was only in Tulsa for thirty days, his beloved car would spend more time in the shop than on the road, and he wanted to savor every moment with it that he could.

It was holding steady for now, at least, the excess of heat preferred to its absence when he lay naked in the backseat, with Andy above him, straddling his hips, his skin hotter to Neal than any temperatures his car could manage.

“Good--idea--to stop,” Andy panted, his breaths shallow but his voice as deep as ever, burrowing itself deep underneath Neal’s skin. Long, agile musician’s fingers encircled both of their cocks, pressing them together; Neal’s hips made short, needy thrusts up into Andy’s hand, as much as his position allowed.

They parked the car off the side of a farm road, lightless and deserted, they couldn’t even wait until they drove back into town. “Fucking _genius_ ,” Neal grunted as he pressed his fingers deeper into Andy, already fitting two inside his ass and readying him for a third.

1969 began with a celebration for all the guests of the Gibson house; Nick had shooed Andy and Neal back into the house when he joined them on the deck to procure the chilled champagne. Upon taking a few swigs from the bottle, however, Phil--drunk on more than just cheap bubbly--decided drinking it was less appealing than spraying it from the bottle onto his unsuspecting friends. Three bottles and an irreparably stained shag carpet later, everyone was soaked, and Neal and Andy, having no intention to crash at Nick’s in such a condition, made a hasty departure.

When the house lights disappeared from Neal’s rearview mirror, Andy casually noted it was also not fun sitting in Neal’s car in wet clothes, the champagne soaking into the leather seats. Pulling over as Andy stripped off his t-shirt, hands then reaching over to the fly on Neal’s jeans, Neal most definitely agreed.

And when it resulted in something like this--Andy above him, his body responding to Neal’s fingers inside him, eyes so dark with lust he could barely see--Neal would always agree with Andy’s bright ideas. “Amazing,” he whispered, his free hand palming Andy’s ass, giving it a playful, experimental slap. He couldn’t take his eyes off Andy’s face, awash in lust, eyes half-lidded and focused on nothing but pleasure. “You look so fucking amazing.”

Chuckling, Andy leaned in, sandwiching their cocks in between their bellies. A thumb swept over Neal’s crown; he was surprised to feel how it drew back wet from precum, how Neal leaked just from Andy’s touch. “You _feel_ amazing,” Andy said, any witty comebacks in his brain gone, pushed aside to spend all his attention on Neal, on this. He shuddered, unable and unwilling to control himself, when the third finger slid in to join the others. Neal watched his eyes flutter closed, and his jaw drop in a silent moan. If Neal never saw anything else in his life, he decided, he could die content.

Arching his back, Neal’s hips pushed off the upholstery, grinding hard into Andy’s and gaining his attention. Andy’s eyes snapped back open, the moan on his lips no longer silent. “Kiss me,” Neal’s voice toed the line between a command and a request, wanting more than anything to feel Andy’s mouth on his but too damn proud to outright ask.

There was little else Andy wanted in the world than to comply, bringing himself down until their chests were pressed flush together, his lips against Neal’s, coaxing them open and letting his tongue dart inside. Andy didn’t think he would ever get tired of the way Neal tasted: his mouth, his skin, his come spilling onto Andy’s tongue. Drawing Neal’s lip in between his teeth, earning a surprised yelp, Andy hoped he would never forget Neal’s taste, now that he had lived every day for nearly a month with it always near. He never wanted to forget.

His body quickly adjusting to the intrusion, Andy found himself thrusting against the touch, pressing Neal in deeper, silently asking for more. His hips were at odds with the rest of his body, pushing backwards against Neal’s hand, forwards into his own fist, hard cock beside Neal’s, surrounded by flesh and warmth. Andy let out a stuttered moan, frustrated with physics that his body couldn’t move in two different directions at once.

Neal took the opportunity to explore the other areas of Andy’s skin with his lips, his tongue, licking a trail down to the hollow of his neck, following the slick path of a bead of sweat. Andy’s skin was salty and bitter, a well-earned, steamy sweat mixed with the remnants of champagne; Neal could get drunk off the taste alone. He sank his teeth into a pulse point, his metal piercings digging into the flesh, and was rewarded with a breathy sigh from Andy; not shouting, not cursing out of pleasure, but a soft, threadbare kind of sound, like it was all Andy could manage from his throat without completely coming undone. Neal would take that kind of sigh any day.

“Want you...” Andy rasped above him, his breath landing hotly against Neal’s brow.

Instinctively Neal moaned, his voice escaping like a haggard growl. With a parting squeeze of his ass Neal’s free hand roamed up Andy’s spine, touching as much skin as he dared. “Y’got me,” he reminded Andy; there was nothing, no one else that stirred emotions in Neal like Andy did, no one else with whom he’d share his thoughts, his music, his body. He certainly couldn’t think of anyone else whom he’d want to lie naked with in the back of his car on a deserted New Year’s night. “All of me...”

His lips began to move along Andy’s collarbone, finding himself lost in the sensation, when Andy clarified, his voice heavy with determination. “No,” he shook his head, while thrusting against Neal’s fingers; his hand released its grip on his cock and focused only on Neal’s, cupping the head in his palm, cradling it. “ _Want_ you.”

Neal’s eyes shot open, suddenly alert. His hand went from the planes of Andy’s back to his shoulder, his cheek, caressing his jaw with a thumb; his eyes went straight to Andy’s, searching for confirmation, for truth. “You sure?” he asked, his fingers slowly retreating out of trepidation. “We never--”

But Andy held fast, holding Neal’s position, clenching around the digits. Neal nearly passed out from the intense pressure he felt, the _heat_ , amazed that Andy wanted him to feel even more. He cried out, his body tensing from it, as Andy leaned in closer until their foreheads touched, sweat mingling with one another, his breath panting but his tone even. “I want...to remember this.” Tempted by their closeness, only inches apart, Andy stole a kiss from Neal’s lips. Neal leaned in for another, longer, aching to taste Andy again, but Andy pulled out of range, his voice more tempting than his mouth could ever be. “Make me remember this.”

“Oh God...” Neal moaned, his head tipping back against the car door, cock throbbing just from the thought of Andy’s request. Fuck, did he want this, and he wanted it with Andy--spending their nights alone together since his birthday, Neal couldn’t get it out of his head. He desired every part of Andy, wanted everything their minds, bodies and hearts could conceive to be together in the time they had...and even more than that, Neal yearned to give every part of himself to Andy, lay himself bare, raw and open, to know his flaws, to know _everything_.

They moved together now, fluidly, as if already connected: Andy bore down on Neal’s mouth as fingers slipped out of him, Neal barely realizing his hands were trembling. The expansive backseat of the Charger gave them more than enough room to maneuver, Neal silently congratulating his younger self on such a fortuitous purchase. The hardtop ceiling barely brushed the top of Andy’s head as he sat up, legs straddling Neal’s hips, moving himself up inch by inch.

Neal stopped him, his hands reaching out to Andy’s thighs, his chest. He pulsed his hips up against Andy’s, and he felt it: his cock, so hard and ready for _something_ it curved up against his belly, leaving a spot of sticky precome in its wake. Wet, he thought, but not enough.

Thinking quickly, he moved to spit into his hand, but Andy was quicker. Shifting his position lower on Neal’s body he leaned down, his back bowed, and without hesitation took Neal into his mouth. He heard the gasp above him, felt Neal’s pleasured surprise in the twitch of his cock, and immediately a hand went into his hair, fingers tangling in the strands. Thank fuck he got to grow his hair until the end of Christmas break; Neal’s fingers found something to grip onto now, to tug when Andy kissed him, or doing other things. It enlivened Andy in ways he didn’t think possible; his hair always looked worse than a bird’s nest once Neal was through with it, but, as he lapped his tongue along the shaft, coating it, Andy didn’t mind.

Losing himself in the task Andy swallowed around Neal’s cock, his cheeks hollowed, his head bobbing up and down on the shaft. All his thoughts focused on sucking Neal, giving him pleasure, teasing out the gasps and moans Andy so reveled in hearing. He swirled his tongue around the crown, finding himself moaning around it, the hum of his throat hitting something deep inside Neal.

But with a sharp tug at his scalp Neal wrenched his head from its position; startled, Andy groaned from the loss. He looked up to see Neal panting heavily, his eyes nearly black, the familiar blue barely noticeable. He had been close--too close, Andy surmised, and it took a few seconds before Neal could even find the breath in him to speak.

“Careful,” he warned through gritted teeth, reluctant to wrench his hands from Andy’s hair. “You’re a little too good at that.” He didn’t know which one felt better, Andy’s mouth on his dick or the breath of laughter that hit him when Andy guffawed and blushed. Fuck, he’d take both if he could, but Neal thought he could live forever just watching Andy smile.

“I’ve had a bit of practice recently,” he grinned, his hands leisurely running up and down Neal’s sides. But the grin soon tempered, the lazy touches turning anxious; Andy’s eyes flashed with vulnerability as he looked into Neal’s, yearning to find the grounding strength there as he had on stage at the Flytrap. “Ready?” he asked in a hushed voice, barely a whisper.

Neal’s hands dropped from Andy’s hair to his face, his thumbs sweeping over cheekbones. Instantly he recalled another time they lay in this car seat, when uncertainty hung over both of them and all Neal cared about was being together, being with Andy. That was twenty-six days ago and he couldn’t have asked for a more memorable time in between. He nodded--he might have been ready for this since October, damn--and brushed a stray hair from Andy’s eyes, wishing to see them unobstructed, unveiled. “You?”

And just like that first day, that first time, Andy leaned into Neal’s touch, and it felt like his entire body sighed with relief. “God, yes,” he breathed, his answer automatic, his resolve never faltering.

They kept their eyes locked onto one another as Andy lifted himself up on shaky limbs, his knees coming to rest at Neal’s sides, hands splayed flat against a tattooed chest. He didn’t dare look away, barely challenged himself to breathe, when he began to lower himself on Neal’s dick, his best friend’s steady hand guiding him, hips pulsing just so. The pressure was more intense than he had ever expected; the heat...dear _God_ , Andy thought, as only the tip of the head breached his entrance, the sensation so different from Neal’s fingers.

Struggling to resist thrusting up and into the tight heat of Andy’s body, Neal watched as Andy took him in, inch by inch, a slow, methodical pace that felt maddening. He could tell from the expressions washing over Andy’s face when they went too far: pleasure mixed with pain on Andy’s furrowed brow, the lip he brought in between nervous teeth and bit down, hard enough to bruise. When Neal felt the head of his cock fully slip inside, enveloped in Andy’s tight hole, he wanted to cry out, but stopped himself when he heard the whimper rise from Andy’s lips.

“If it hurts, we can stop,” Neal offered, running his free hand along Andy’s chest, his stomach, reaching over to give tender, reassuring strokes. The lustful, carnal part of him thought he might die if they stop now, his cock already throbbing and his heart pounding in his chest, but Neal refused to go any further if it meant hurting Andy. More than anything he didn’t want to hurt him.

But, startling Neal, the whimper from Andy’s lips turned to a snarl. He dug his fingers into Neal’s chest, slowly rocking himself on Neal’s dick, acclimating himself to the sensation. “You stop now and I’ll murder you,” he growled. Neal had never been so turned on in his life.

Andy kept the pace for the pair, tortuously slow at first, letting his muscles stretch and give to accommodate Neal’s cock, until Neal was fully inside, down to the base. Andy gave out a ragged sigh, the feeling of fullness completely overwhelming him, the realization that Neal was _inside_ him hitting him with full force. He straddled Neal’s hips, motionless for a moment, letting that feeling sink into his bones; he closed his eyes and shivered, barely even able to imagine life a month before, without this, without Neal by his side.

He shivered in a very different way when Neal’s hand drifted south to Andy’s cock, fist making a tight sheath, mimicking Andy’s body around Neal’s. Neal could take the stillness no longer, the heat around his dick nearly painful without any movement, no friction. His hips began to pulse against Andy’s, a slow, rolling movement, testing out the waters. “Good?” he asked, searching Andy’s eyes for a gauge.

It was tough to not start laughing at the question: with the dizzying emotions swirling around his head and the slowly jacking hand on his cock, Andy was remiss to think of anything feeling better than this. “Yeah...” he waited for the rhythmic roll of Neal’s hips to make their cycle again before adding his own to the mix, a complement to Neal’s movements, a symphony of sensuality. He remembered the words Neal used to describe him earlier, when they were just two teenagers fooling around in a fogged-up car, a cliche even Andy couldn’t pass up; but now it felt so much more than that, emotions running as deep as Neal was buried into him. “Amazing.”

The words held so much more weight now as their bodies began to move in tandem, Neal’s tentative little thrusts growing faster, more pronounced, as Andy grinded on him, his thighs clenched tighter against Neal’s sides. Finally breaking their stare, Neal’s head rolled back, smacking against the Charger’s door handle; he’d have a bruise there in the morning but at that moment he wouldn’t care if it cracked open his skull. The pressure against his cock coming in from all directions was like nothing he had felt before: not like a mouth, or a hand, or even that girl he had been with one drunken night in college. This was Andy, his best friend, growing to be so much more to him in the past month, giving himself over to Neal, letting him _fuck_ him...an uncontrollable moan escaped his lips at the thought, hips snapping up to meet Andy’s, breaking out of rhythm.

His sudden thrust surprised Andy, catching him off-guard: it was unusual for a musician like Neal to lose his pace, but, he supposed, this was a bit different from making music. He felt Neal’s cock plunge deep into him, no hesitation of movement this time, allowing passion to overtake caution. It struck something deep inside him, a nerve they had discovered together the first time in Neal’s basement bedroom, that sent jolts of intense, electric pleasure through every inch of Andy’s body. His mind started reeling, bright blooms of color and sparks flooding his vision, and he bit his lip, fighting to hold back from moaning Neal’s name.

“Yeah... _fuck_ yeah,” Neal said, thrusting harder now, no longer worried about his best friend breaking should they play too rough. One hand gripped onto Andy’s hip, fingers digging into the skin, as the other kept its tight sheath on Andy’s dick, matching pace with Neal’s thrusts, squeezing at the head. It wasn’t the same overwhelming sensation of Andy’s hole--Neal realized that now, _nothing_ felt like this in the world, absolutely nothing--but Neal wished to bring Andy as close as he could get. “Fuck, Andy, you feel so tight...”

Andy arched his back, the hands at Neal’s chest clenched into fists. The new angle brought the head of Neal’s cock up against that spot inside Andy, brushing it every single time. “ _Harder_ ,” he implored, his eyes fluttering closed, breath a ghostly shell of his usual voice. He began to push back against Neal’s thrusts, burying Neal deeper inside him, his ministrations only enlivening Neal more.

With a guttural groan Neal dug in harder, faster, his hips rising up off the car seat in every thrust. Andy bent farther down, careful not to let his head ram into the car’s ceiling; he could feel the heat of Neal’s breath on his lips now, the heat of their bodies pressed closer together. Neal’s pace grew faster, deep, uncontrollable grunts rising from his throat every time he plunged deeper; he was close, that familiar feeling coiling in his gut, but Andy was right with him, breath coming in desperate bursts, eyes screwed tightly shut.

One flick of Neal’s wrist, one more thrust into Andy’s pliant body, and Andy was gone, shouting suddenly, his cock jerking in Neal’s steady grip, spilling himself along colorfully inked knuckles. He had no time to regroup, to compose himself after his own orgasm, as Neal’s cock started pumping into him, the pressure from his body more than Neal could bear. It left Andy breathless and whimpering, sore but sated; when his eyes opened again he saw bright blue ones staring back into his, Neal’s gaze searching for confirmation that this had been real.

“Good?” Neal asked again, his chest heaving. With his free hand he reached up and brushed the same stubborn strand of hair from Andy’s face, fingers lazily drawing along his hairline, gathering the sweat that had beaded there.

Andy’s eyes closed at the touch, heaviness creeping into his bones; all he could manage was a nod, but it would never encompass all the emotions in the answer he wished to give. Courteously he waited for Neal to clean them off--using Neal’s hoodie, no need to explain _that_ to Andy’s parents--before collapsing on top of him, groaning from weariness.

“What, not up for another?” Neal joked, laughing, the soft chuckle traveling through his chest, rumbling like an old car over a dirt path. Andy pressed his cheek to the sensation, hiding his smile among the swaths of colorful ink. “C’mon, Skib, the night is young...”

An offended grunt came from above him. “Maybe when I can walk again,” Andy replied, refusing to respect that question by raising his head. They remained like that for a while, their bodies covered in a thin sheen of sweat, stretched out along the backseat, listening to each other’s breaths return to normal. Only when Neal felt Andy shiver above him did he realize the silence they enjoyed indicated something else.

Neal cursed--a short, angry breath, and Andy decided he liked the feeling of Neal’s laughter more. “Damn heat died,” he realized, the Charger’s windows foggy and the air steamy from the pair’s body heat alone.

Reluctantly Andy offered to find the car blanket, disentangling himself from Neal’s embrace and searching through the front seat. When he came back, the ratty old quilt in hand, Neal pulled him back overtop him, claiming that Andy was better at keeping him warm than any blanket ever had.

“You’re fucking hilarious,” Andy muttered, grin on his face, as he slid down next to Neal on the seat, draping the blanket onto the both of them. It was a tight fit, and half the time Andy thought he would tip right on over onto the floor, but then Neal wrapped an arm around his waist, hand reassuringly stroking his back, and the worries disappeared.

“So,” Neal said, his head finding the hollow of Andy’s neck the perfect nestling spot. “Will you remember this?”

It was difficult to answer when Neal’s lips were on his collarbone, taking small, unassuming nips at Andy’s skin. “Don’t think my ass’ll let me forget. My own fault, I guess; I asked for it.”

He expected a retort from Neal, or at least a friendly slap on the body part in question, but he was quiet beside him, barely letting out any breath. When he spoke again it was in a small whisper; Neal didn’t trust his voice enough to ask any louder.

“Will you remember me?”

The lips along the pulse at Andy’s throat felt it quicken; the arm draped across his frame felt Andy’s breath catch. It took a moment for Andy to fully digest Neal’s words, take them in and hold them in his mind, refusing to let go. It was yet another moment for him to answer, his voice shaky, too drained in every way to mask his emotions.

“I shouldn’t have to.” His voice held more bite than Neal expected; more than Andy had expected to come from his own mouth. He thought of the many months he spent waiting for letters, for any sign that Neal was safe; how he felt the world crash down when that one letter came saying that he wasn’t. Andy had spent so much time enjoying the here and now, reveling in Neal’s presence, that he hadn’t any concern about how the future would feel, how worse waiting would actually be.

“It fucking sucks you have to leave.” Once the words began they started tumbling out, a tiny stream turning into a raging river. Brow creasing, Andy vented the frustrations they hadn’t spoken before. If he couldn’t tell Neal about his fears, then he could tell no one. “You served enough time over there, they shouldn’t take more. Fucking army. You’re one soldier,” he shivered a bit, because in Andy’s mind, Neal wasn’t just one soldier, he was his soldier. “They can spare one soldier. It’s not right; it’s not fucking _fair_ \--”

His voice grew louder, more impassioned with each word, filling up the empty space in the car with doubt. Angrier, louder noise could never stop the flow from Andy’s heart out his mouth, but where sound might have failed, silence succeeded. Very quietly Neal pursed his lips, letting out a calming hiss, shushing Andy and tenderly stemming the tide of words.

When all was quiet in the Charger once more, Neal moved his hand slowly, almost reverently, from Andy’s back over to his chest, fingers threading through the dark strands of hair growing in. He stopped right at the center, palm laid flat against the skin, fingers curved into a tiny shallow cup, as if ready to fold over the neck of a guitar, or tilt Andy’s chin up for a kiss. His eyes trained on his own movements, Neal could feel his best friend’s heartbeat, a steady rhythm pounding on the hollow of his hand, a musician’s metronome. The hand rose and fell with each breath Andy drew into his lungs, even and sure, confident and safe.

The beats of his heart, the air in his lungs; Neal felt it all right at his fingertips, a pulsing touch, the very definition of being alive.

Suddenly overwhelmed, Neal shuddered with emotion, curving in closer to Andy’s body, his hand balling into a loose fist, recording that feeling in the muscles, memorizing it. He wanted this moment pure, unblemished by talk of the war, the words threatening to crowd the entire car and swallow them whole. He wanted a heartbeat to drown out those words in his head, until all he could feel was Andy, all he would remember was holding him in his arms.

Neal might have to risk his life in war again soon; Andy might get drafted that year once he turned eighteen. But for just one night, they had this.


	16. Chapter 16

The old building was timeless. It was no Great Pyramids, or the Parthenon, no one trekked miles and miles to take a photograph in front of it and buy a cheap souvenir paperweight to take home. But it had seen its share of visitors: thousands, maybe millions in its lifetime, college students coming home for Christmas, loved ones reuniting over too many years and miles apart. Families traveling to a wedding, a new birth; soldiers carted off to war. Tulsa’s bus depot had seen it all.

It was a ratty old structure, nothing close to the glamour of a big-city hub, built out of function in the days when everyone needed to get the hell out of Oklahoma, and fast. The galvanized steel hangovers were rusting, their paint unkempt and chipped, like skeletons of prehistoric birds, or old propeller planes left to rot. The building within was no better, painted a dark, moody brown meant to evoke mahogany but only aging the place before its time. The walls were stained with ages of exhaust dirt and grime, sticking to it like a shadow; apart from the paint they were bare, cold brick and naked pipes greeting newcomers, sheetrock a Depression era luxury. When the autumn storms came the roof creaked as if it were made of matchsticks, but with an almost sentient resilience the depot remained unscathed after every tornado season, like nature could never bring destruction to such a monument of misery.

It told every man, woman and child who boarded a bus out to St. Louis, or Kansas City, or down to Dallas or even Austin, that this was the last memory they would have of Tulsa, and good riddance.

That particular morning the station was teeming with activity, a school bus painted a dull green idling in one of the bays, its passengers and their families milling about, watching the minute hand on the grimy depot clock as it revolved. Most of the passengers were teenagers, fresh-faced and basking in their early tastes of manhood: shoulders straight and broad, they wore their fatigues with a headstrong kind of pride, hoping the bravado in their bones masked the uncertainty in their eyes.

The bus depot had seen this scene before, many times over: different buses, different wars, different men. Nothing, to the casual eye, appeared out of sorts, everything as routine that January morning as every morning, the buses loading and unloading their living breathing cargo, always on the move. But a closer trained eye might notice the dull green duffel in the corner of the station, one out of countless army issues filling the depot that morning; even closer and they might see the tiny corridor the duffel blocked in its path, a crawl space for maintenance workers, designed to avoid a devastating fire. And only a viewer who knew how to look would find the two men tucked inside the lightless corridor, entangled in a deep embrace, kissing like there would be no tomorrow, because there would be no tomorrow.

“Andy, fuck...oh, shit, _Andy,_ ” Neal moaned into an open, waiting mouth, his words muffled but their intentions loud and clear. His hips grinded up against Andy’s, cock stiff underneath his thick fatigues, as his arms found their way against Andy’s shoulders, pinning him to the wall.

Not that Andy needed the force: he remained in the corridor quite under his own will, just as hard and as needy as Neal, desperate hands running up and underneath Neal’s standard-issue shirt. He hoped with a wicked streak of glee that Neal’d get reprimanded at base for the wrinkles Andy was putting into his uniform. “Shhhh,” he playfully chided Neal, once Neal’s lips started traveling southward, down to Andy’s neck. “Can’t let anyone hear...”

The groan Neal gave in response reverberated through Andy’s body like a tuning fork, making him shudder. With the roaring of bus engines echoing through the depot, bouncing off bare walls, and the din of a distracted crowd, the chances of someone eavesdropping were slim. Besides, Neal admitted to himself as his lips traced a path from Andy’s cheek to his earlobe, he would rarely get the chance in the next six months to speak Andy’s name, if ever; he wanted to remember the name with passion behind it, with all the desire he’d felt in the past month. Fuck, so long as no one would hear, Neal would chant Andy’s name like a devotion, a prayer, until it was sealed in his memory.

“More like this?” he teased, tongue darting out to trace along the shell of Andy’s ear. He let out a long, hissing rasp, knuckles white on Andy’s shoulders as they gripped each other tighter, as if by force alone they could will each other to stay. “ _Andy..._ ”

This time it was Andy’s turn to moan, the sound of his name on Neal’s lips echoing through his body. Breaking his own rule, it was certainly not quiet, but at that moment he didn’t give a fuck if the whole world could hear. “Fuck,” he gasped as Neal used his mouth in other ways at Andy’s ear, lips dragging the lobe in between teeth. “Gonna miss this...”

That took the wind out of Neal’s sails: though still panting hot, shallow breaths, his lips stopped their ministrations at Andy’s words, the grip on his shoulders softening to an embrace. It crashed them back to reality, the noises of the bus depot engulfing them, reminding them of the little privacy they held and the little time that they had. Neal pressed his cheek to Andy’s, his coppery whiskers also not long for this world. “Gonna miss _you_ ,” he whispered into that same ear, his breath kissing the flesh more tender and eloquent than his lips.

A heaviness sank into Andy’s chest, no longer able to hide from the inevitable, no matter how hard they had fought against it. The hands under Neal’s shirt slowed to soft, smooth palms against his back, taking in as much tacitly as they could. “Me, too,” he agreed, his eyes closing with a sigh. He didn’t move until he felt Neal’s lips on his again, the kiss itself not hard or desperate, but saying everything in the lightness of his touch, as if Neal were already slowly fading away.

“Write,” Neal said when their lips parted; a request, a plea. His blue eyes were wide and alert, scanning every feature on Andy’s face, every inch. Out of all the moments they had together in the past month, Neal wished this was the one that wasn’t real. “Please. A letter, a song, fucking postcards--anything--”

Andy immediately agreed, sealing the promise with another kiss, desperate for the contact. He would never think to take that away from Neal, from himself: that connection to almost another world, a scrawled handwriting reminding them instantly of home, to hold sheets of paper in their hands and know there was someone out there who cared. It was different from the promises made in the treehouse nearly a year ago, when two friends separated into a world of unknown. The stakes were so much higher now; so much more had been pulled into the light.

“And I want letters,” Andy bargained, feeling Neal’s hands move upwards from his shoulders to the sides of his face, thumbs brushing his jaw; calloused hands of a musician, not a soldier. “I don’t care if your fucking hand falls off from writing them, Neal, I want them.” He tried to swallow a thick lump in his throat but it stubbornly refused to go away, threatening to bubble to the top and overflow if he tried again. When he tried speaking again it was in a softer voice, more vulnerable than he ever felt when Neal’s mouth was on his. “I need them.”

Neal opened his mouth to assent, tell Andy he wouldn’t dream of not writing to him. But the sound of harsh, barking orders came from the echoing interior of the bus depot, the authoritative shout of a drill sergeant that Neal would forever recognize. Soldiers and recruits began to say their final goodbyes to loved ones, making their solemn steps to the bus, the beginning of a long journey. The time for farewells was at an end; the rest of their lives, however long or short their duration, was awaiting them.

He looked out from their tiny corridor, a private space he wished was free from the constraints of time moving on; though cold, the Tulsa morning that January was sunny, and light streamed in through dirty station windows, nearly blinding him. Never before had Neal wished more to stay in the dark. It was different from the treehouse but all the same: being forced to leave, to let go, and Neal had to be the one to walk away. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath, watching fellow soldiers board the bus one by one, until Andy’s voice brought back his attention.

“Stay.”

His head snapped back to the man in his arms, Andy’s eyes clear and determined, albeit strained, searching for a reason in Neal’s face. “You don’t have to get on that bus,” he continued, the hands drawn underneath Neal’s army uniform clenching into nervous fists. “There’s gotta be something we can do--”

“Andy...” Neal said, shaking his head; he wanted to speak Andy’s name forever, but not like this. He leaned in to kiss him again, but Andy held firm, his thoughts running faster than his desires.

“We can get out of here,” he proposed, his thoughts turning to wild alternatives; anything to keep Neal’s boots off that bus, keep him closer to him, longer. “Go anywhere we want. New York, California...for Chrissakes, we’re in a bus station!” His mind reeled with the possibilities, tumbling around disorganized and desperate. They could see his sister in New York City, find some refuge there; or make their way to the West Coast, try their hand at the music career Nick claimed they were destined to have. Neal always said he wanted to see Los Angeles. Andy wasn’t thinking about his last semester of high school, or much less telling his parents he wanted to abscond with his best friend; he only wanted to be with Neal for just a little longer, for as long as they could draw it out.

And as much as Neal wanted the same--ride the fuck out of town on a Greyhound, his middle finger in the air and the other arm around Andy--he knew the consequences. He heard stories of deserters--cowards, they were always called, their names spat in the dirt of the jungle--and the manhunts that followed. Tales of courts and imprisonments were always circulating army bases, but what Neal never heard about were times when deserters got away with it.

He shook his head once again, eyes tinged with sadness. “I can’t desert,” he protested. “Doesn’t matter where you go; they find you. And it ain’t pretty when they do.”

Andy’s eyes flashed a pang of pain at Neal’s refusal, one more escape route shut down, one less chance to keep Neal with him, keep him safe. It only lasted a moment, though, and in the next breath Andy was on another alternative, wild and implausible, but every bone in his body told him he had to try.

“Canada,” he blurted out, his hands entangling themselves in Neal’s shirt, so reluctant to let go. “They’re not at war there, they think the draft’s shit anyway. If we get there--I don’t know, drive through Minnesota or something--the army won’t look for you. I heard lots of draftees are doing it--Monty told me about it.” He quickly amended the statement; yes, Andy heard about the clever and desperate draft dodgers making their way north, out of reach from the ever-pressing hands of the military; Canada welcomed them, their government deploring forced conscription. But the information had come from one of the meetings he attended at the university, a speaker who had been passing out pamphlets on the legal methods to avoid the war; Andy withheld that detail, thinking Neal would trust the suggestion more if he believed it came from a likable source.

Still it would not sway Neal’s decision; it wasn’t even a decision anymore, he thought, his sad resignation to his fate already set in stone. The barking voice of the base sergeant had started calling the soldiers’ names on the recruitment roster; he was up to the Ms by the time Andy’s thoughts turned northbound. A tightness grew in Neal’s chest as he watched the expression on Andy’s face, expectant and pleading. The first time Neal left, Andy had revealed to him that he was scared; this time, the emotions ran deeper, far past what any one word could describe.

Neal was scared, too, more than before, now that he had seen the sun rise over Vietnam and felt the rice paddies sag underneath his bootheel; now that he knew the kind of destruction he left a month ago and that awaited him still. But he had known from the start, as he knew now, he had no other choice.

“I can’t,” he said again; his hand went to Andy’s face, a finger tracing the thin, stubborn line of his lips. He thought his resolve would break when Andy’s eyes fluttered closed, a shaky breath breezing against Neal’s finger, and he pursed his lips to kiss it tenderly. When he spoke again his voice was a rough rasp, as if his own vocal chords refused to comply in his decision. “No matter how much I want to.”

When Neal replaced his finger with his lips, their kiss was gentle, feather-light, just a taste of everything they had experienced in the past month with each other. If they went any further, pressed any deeper now, it would make this hurt that much more. The sergeant was up to the Ss now; almost time, Neal nearly choked on the thought, and he wondered if this would feel any better when it was Andy’s turn, and Neal was the one sending his soldier off to war.

“Go,” Andy finally conceded, his throat pushing the word past his teeth, not out of resentment, but to have it be done with, run the bullet through and through. The duffel at their feet, the rough army canvas of Neal’s uniform against Andy’s skin...he knew there’d be no turning back now, no returning to the bliss the past month had given them. Andy smoothed down Neal’s collar, tugged the hem of the shirt back into his trousers, but he wasn’t brave enough to look him in the eye. “You’ve made your mind up, you’ve got to. Do it, or I’ll tie you down and make you stay.”

Neal chuckled; Andy didn’t want to think about when would be the next time he’d hear his best friend laugh. “Kinky, Skib,” he remarked. “Maybe we’ve gotta try that when I get back.”

In spite of himself Andy smiled; but it didn’t become a true smile, one that reached the corners of his eyes and he felt right at his core, until Neal tipped Andy’s chin up to look him in the eye. The familiar blue he saw was laced with sadness but they were strong, refusing to let that sorrow overtake him. He did not want these last moments remembered with forlorn frowns and pleas not to leave. The vise around Andy’s heart slackened; if Neal could trudge through this goodbye then so could he, and he wasn’t even the one going off to fight.

“Say hi to Dave for me,” he said, letting a smirk sneak through. “Bryan, too. Tell them I’ll beat their asses if they let you get blown to bits by a mine.”

“They’ll hold you to that, you know,” Neal joked, reaching out from their corridor for his duffel. The morning light from the bus depot’s windows sliced across his arm, illuminating it, as if Neal were stepping out into an entirely different world.

Before he exposed any other part of himself into the light, Andy reached out for Neal’s wrist, pulling his attentions back. Joking was all well and good, and it hurt a lot less than the alternative, but there were times Neal needed to know Andy was dead serious. “...Don’t you let yourself get blown to bits, either,” he added.

With a soft smile Neal turned back towards Andy, wrapping an arm around his waist for a last embrace. Pulling in close he brushed his lips against Andy’s temple, feeling the warmth of Andy’s touch as his arms encircled Neal’s waist, returning the hug. He could give him this: a heartfelt goodbye, like the last chord of a slow, soft song, tying together everything that came before it. But what he couldn’t give Andy was a promise he’d come back alive.

“You take care of that guitar, will ya?” he whispered into Andy’s hair instead. He felt the arms around his waist pull in a little tighter before releasing their grasp, Andy stepping away, letting go.

It wasn’t easy for Neal to walk away from that dark corner of the depot, their safe place; it would have probably been easier, he thought later, if he hadn’t glanced back at Andy in the shadows, looking forlorn, lost. Every instinct in Neal’s body told him to go back, screw the army and follow wherever Andy wanted to take him. But he didn’t want to face the consequences if his boots never touched the floor of that bus; maybe this time, the dodger was braver than the soldier.

“Wait.”

He had already stepped into the sunlight, its warmth washing over his body a pale comparison to Andy’s touch, when he heard the call. Reluctantly Neal turned around, knowing his resolve danced on the edge of a knife; one look back into Andy’s eyes and it could push him over the edge. But what greeted him was a swath of crumpled-up drab olive green, held out to him by his best friend’s hand.

“You forgot your jacket,” Andy said. Neal’s fingers brushed against his as he took the standard-issue coat and humped it over his shoulder; it would be the last time they would touch.

Neal boarded the bus dutifully when his name was called, the first in a long string of the army’s orders he knew he would have to obey. When the soldiers pulled out of the depot, Neal had his face to the window, staring at the decrepit building until it faded over the horizon. He couldn’t see Andy anymore within the crowd of people sending them off, but he knew with a little tug of his heart that he must have been standing among them, watching until the bus turned onto the highway and out of sight.

The station always reminded its visitors, the ones disembarking on great journeys or simply finding their way back home, that one old, rusted eyesore of a building would be their last memory of Tulsa. Neal wished at that moment he could burn it to the ground.

It wasn’t until they were clear out of Tulsa, the endless plains seeming to stretch all the way to the ocean, that Neal felt a heaviness in his army jacket, an extra, bulky volume that had not been there before. Carefully he unfolded it and reached into the pocket; a small stack of papers greeted him, crumpled and well-traveled, the ink bleeding over from one side to the other from so many edits and revisions. He recognized it immediately: it was the music to their song, the ballad Neal had first written while he was in basic training almost a year ago; the song they pledged to keep to themselves until it was complete.

His fingers ghosted over the notes he remembered so well, eyes scanning his own drafts and Andy’s handwritten adjustments as if they were one. But what he had never seen before were the lines scrawled at the end of the very last page, words he could already hear in his mind, plotted out by Andy’s voice, soft and clear, always ringing true.

 

_Waiting for the sun to go down_  
 _Just like it did the day that you left me_  
 _Waiting for the sun to go down_  
 _Just like it did the day that you went away_  
 _All I have to do is make it through_  
 _Until dawn..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song lyrics of the previously known "mystery song" :P are from Until Dawn, found on MWK's physical release of their [Luna Despierta EP](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mwk4).
> 
> ~~*snrk* _physical release_...~~


	17. Chapter 17

> _January 15, 1969_
> 
> _Déjà fucking vu, isn’t it, Skib._
> 
> _It’s almost a year since I sent back this same exact letter to you, from the same place; thought I’d be done with this army shit by now, either that or dead, I suppose. They’ve sent me back to the base in Texas for reorientation, just in case I’ve forgotten any of the boring, useless drills they crammed into my head the last time I was here. (You may hate them, but you never forget them. I’ll probably be an old man, barely able to get up in the morning, and still know how to disassemble an M-16 and spit-shine it till it gleams. You’ve got a right to hold me to that, Andy.)_
> 
> _I’m in the same place, around the same time I was last year, but it’s nowhere near the same feeling. I came in with all these new recruits, as shiny and new as the lacquer on their boots, barely any older than you. Some of them are ballsy, trash-talking sons of bitches; I knew a few of those kind myself the first time around, guys who thought they’d take on Ho Chi Minh all by themselves and get home in time for a turkey dinner. But most of them are nervous, scared; they show their fear too much, too often, and too soon to know what to really be afraid of. First week and they all just want to go back home, they say, shaking like prairie grass in the wind._
> 
> _Seeing all those new guys out here’s tough; I want to take them by the shoulders, shake them for real, tell them everything I learned last year. That everything the sergeants are teaching them on base’ll do them shit good out in the field; that the rank and file shit and all the protocol in the world means nothing when you’re in the thick of combat and you’re only out for yourself, to get to the next morning still breathing. Every day I think I’ll go tell them, throw a monkey wrench in the army’s little conditioning plans, but I don’t. I see too much of myself in these green recruits, and no one told me how hard it was going to be, how much of a hell Vietnam really was. I had to learn the hard way, and they should, too._
> 
> _There’s only one good thing about being back here: Dave’s back as well from his free leave, chipper as a fucking daisy from his month of R-and-R. He’s got a duffel bag full of puppy photos to keep him company while in country and a stupid little patch of hair on his chin he likes to call a beard, but I call a faceful of gravy he hadn’t wiped off from dinner. (I showed him my glory of a beard and he did have to admit it was impressive. Didn’t matter much either way; the minute we got into base they took all of it off: hair, beard, that little patch of dirt sticking to Dave’s chin. Fuck I hate the army.)_
> 
> _The month back in Kansas City really did him some good: he fleshed out, that’s for damn sure--a month of home cooking after almost a year of shitty C-rations will sure do that to you--and if I didn’t know better I’d say he’d been fattening up to fail the army’s weight requirement. (He told me I didn’t look so badly out of shape, asked if I picked up running or something. Yeah, right, me running. I just told him I got a steady exercise partner. It’s not untrue, after all.) And he got to see his family, which is why he wanted to come home in the first place. He didn’t tell me much about the visit, only says they’re as good as they possibly can be, but I can tell from the smile in his eyes he really appreciated having this time with them, even if it means going back to war for another six months._
> 
> _Hate to be more than the surly asshole everyone on base thinks I am, but David Cook is a pretty fucking upstanding, good guy. But when you finally do meet him, Andy, don’t tell him I ever said that._
> 
> _Dave wanted me to tell you he’s sorry about missing the Flytrap show, even though I told him he had a perfectly good excuse for not driving all the way down to Oklahoma for one amateur concert. Said he’d been working on his own with writing a few songs, maybe even thinking of cutting his own record. He sang me a few of them and they’re pretty good; his voice is getting better, more skilled, but it still can’t beat yours. Especially the ways I’ve heard it._
> 
> _It feels good to have someone here who gets it all--who knows what I’m going through, because Dave’s got the same battle as me. The recruits give us a wide berth, almost scared to get too close to the soldiers who’ve been through it all, gone to hell and back and are revvin’ up to do it again. Suits me just fine; I’m not looking to make friends here, especially these poor grunts who’ve almost got “worm food” stamped right on their foreheads. I’d take bets on how long they last in country before they bit it, but the only one I’d have to bet with is Dave, and he’s, understandably, not big on joking about people dying._
> 
> _We’re here about a week, I think, going through a crash course in basic all over again before getting shipped out. It feels like we’ve been held back a grade, Dave and I know all of this stuff and, even more, know how useless it is once you get your ass into Vietnam. I wouldn’t say I’m happy about going back, hell no, but it’ll be better than hanging around Texas, that’s for damn sure. I’m being unnecessarily trained here, getting all wound up to go and shoot and act but I’m not there just yet. We’re just sitting and stewing here, just waiting and I hate it._
> 
> _The faster I get out to Vietnam, the faster I can come right on back home._
> 
> _And I know it should go without saying, but just in case you’d forget...I miss you. A lot. I’ve got no music here, nothing to listen to but march songs and absolutely no guitars to play; I’ve got the tunes in my head, the songs we’ve written, but after playing and hearing and just being so close to the music for a full month it’s not easy to leave it all cold turkey. And just having someone to talk to, someone who’s always there to listen and understand...I’d go psycho without Dave here, probably blow up the base or hijack my ass to Mexico, but it’s not like having you here. In...a lot of ways, he’s definitely not you._
> 
> _It feels so strange being here on base, surrounded by wide-eyed rookies looking at me like I’m a damn expert at the war, an outsider in a place I never wanted to be to begin with, with experience I wish I never had. Sounds fucking weird, but I’ll be relieved to get to Vietnam. At least I know what to expect there: the tension, the combat; the fucking heat that feels like you’re being boiled right in the fields. I know what to do there, I know how to react. Compared to this place, being in country’ll feel damn normal._
> 
> _But I could still really go for the kind of normal we had in Tulsa._
> 
> _Neal_
> 
> __

***

> _January 24, 1969_
> 
> _I don’t know if you’ll ever get this letter._
> 
> _Military mail rates are so fucking slow, Neal--it took five days for your letter to get to me, and it only came from Texas, goddamn it. Someone was probably using it to prop up their wobbly table for a few days before finally deciding to send it on. By the time this goes into the mailbox I’m sure you’ll be out of the country, dropped off in the middle of some war-ravaged jungle wondering why the hell your best friend stopped caring enough to write._
> 
> _I couldn’t wait for your forwarding address; I didn’t want you to think I stopped caring._

Andy reread the last line on the page, a deepening frown on his face. He considered scratching it out, marking his hesitancy with bold, dark sweeps of his pen until only a chaotic black blob lay in its place. But even then the brand would be made, his indecisiveness counted twofold: Neal wouldn’t then think about Andy not caring enough, but instead what the hell was so important for Andy to cross out, what worded mistakes he had to hide. 

They had made a pact not to keep anything from each other in their letters; Andy had been the first to request it from Neal, and now, he had to make good on it himself.

Writing the letters to Neal had never been easy: their friendship rooted deep in music and sound, in silent, knowing glances, Andy found so much lacking in only words, so limiting. Especially now, after a month of needing merely a touch to tell Neal everything he wanted to say...his eyes closed with a sigh, wishing he had that contact again.

And even still, he pressed on, wrenching the words from himself, determined to write the letter, to send it even with the little hope it would reach its intended destination. Andy remembered the first time Neal had sent him a letter from basic training in Texas, how he entreated for Andy’s response, half-expecting to never hear from him again. The urge to write had been so strong then and it never waned; he knew his role as Neal’s sounding board, his confidante, and Andy wanted Neal to know he was still there for him, and always would be.

It was finding the words to say it--and not sounding like a complete square, he thought with a grimace--that was the hard part.

The daylight hours were growing longer now, the winter sunsets stretching out longer over the flat Oklahoma plain ever since Neal’s birthday, a night Andy happily remembers as the longest of the year. But now the cold, waning sun was all that greeted him when he left school each afternoon, the parking lot empty of a familiar engine’s hum, the blare of a horn he responded to like a Pavlovian puppy. The faint lavender wisps of the day’s sun were still streaking across the sky outside his bedroom as he wrote, his pen poised to either ink another line or obliterate the one before it.

A month ago, the skies were dark this time of night, his curtains closed to keep the winter drafts away, and Neal would have been lounging in his bed, tempting Andy to join him.

> _So, hopefully this does get to you. Waiting another month, or fuck even a week, would have been too long. And I know you understand the feeling, because you yourself just wrote to tell me you’re okay from Texas, and shit Neal, I know you’re alright in Texas, army base or not. I’m hoping I’m not the only one who was anxious to write._
> 
> _Good to hear that Dave is doing well; I know it can’t be a great time for either of you right now. I hope his family’s doing okay without him there, it really must not be easy for him to leave, especially from what you’ve told me about how close he is with his brothers. (Though he’s got the added benefit of seeing your ass every day all over again. I’m sure he’s thrilled.) Lexi left for school again in New York right after you left for training, and while it’s real nice to use her car and monopolize the dark room, the house does feel kinda lonely. My mom’s taking it the worst out of all of us; be careful when you come back, she might just try to adopt you._
> 
> _That sucks about the hair, man, I know how much you wanted to grow it out. But you knew that this day was coming and they’d cut it all off, no matter how much you loved it or how glorious you thought it looked. (Hate to be the one to tell you this, but it wasn’t all that glorious. What you thought made you look like a Nordic god was quickly turning into you looking like a hobo. I wasn’t going to say anything until small mammals started using your beard as nesting material, then we might have had a problem.)_

Smiling to himself, Andy smoothed a palm over his clean-shaven face, remembering the wiry brush of Neal’s growing beard against his skin; he couldn’t lie to himself, Neal wouldn’t be the only one missing the hair. It was one of the first smiles he mustered ever since Neal had left, finding little to be cheerful about with his best friend headed back to the line of fire. His skin recalled the brave abrasiveness of Neal’s beard, prickly and rough at first, the fledgling hairs soon sprouting downy and coppery red. Andy wished he had that freedom to let his whiskers grow in bushy and thick, if only for a month like Neal’s rebellion; if only to rake his cheek down Neal’s fresh face and give him a stinging taste of his own medicine. 

Though quite different from the army, the institution forcing Andy’s face clean and hair short was equally as detested. Handling his last semester in high school was proving to be an uphill battle, a final stretch difficult for any anxious senior but even moreso for Andy, drifting from academic apathy to downright contempt. Each class lagged on for him, knowing that there would be no relief at the end of the day as he had a month before, no Charger purring in the parking lot, no Neal waiting to pick him up and see where the afternoon would take them. He considered dropping out--the thought passed every Monday morning as he walked to homeroom--but wouldn’t squander the money his parents spent on tuition, funding his education for years only to bolt months before graduation.

He fought the bilious lump in his throat every time he remembered high school was one of the only things keeping him from his own impending draft. He’d cross that bridge when it came, but he was certainly in no rush to reach it. Andy’s worst thoughts, the ones that kept him in his seat at study hall, were of getting shipped off to play soldier before Neal ever came back home.

> _Cherish all that extra time you’ve got at basic sitting on your ass, I guess: you don’t know how much of that you’ll have once you get to Vietnam. (And that off-time in country better be spent writing letters. Don’t get lazy on me, Tiemann, I’ve got your guitar under my care, after all.) It must be good to get your bearings, dig your feet in before you go off; I remember how much you hated all the work they had you do in basic and how little of what you learned actually did you some good once you hit Vietnam. Hope they don’t still have you and Dave cleaning, though I bet I would’ve heard you bitching about it in your letter if they did._
> 
> _I’ve found myself with a lot of free time on my hands these days, too. Guess we spent more time together than I thought; there are these huge blocks in the day where I’ve just got nothing to do now that you’re not here. I’ve got Lexi’s car but nowhere to go; got tons of possibilities but they’re just not as fun without someone to share them with. Yeah, I have school, and I spend most of my afternoons practicing--sorry, nothing new, the creative part of my brain’s apparently gone to Texas with you--but even with that I’ve got empty hours on my hands. I know, I know, I’m complaining about too much free time, how fucking privileged can I be...but I really wish you were back and I was wasting all that time with you again. These days, all these hours feel empty, but when we spent them together, they didn’t really feel like a waste._

Taking a deep breath, Andy hesitated to continue, his thoughts getting further than his pen. They promised these letters would only hold whole truths, give each other someone in the world they didn’t have to lie to; but Andy wasn’t sure just how truthful he should let himself be. 

He pushed aside the thoughts his heart wanted to elaborate, the moments they shared last month that Andy would trade anything to have again. Instead he wrote on, his narrative taking a different path, describing to Neal how he was managing to fill the hours left empty by his departure. With the school semesters beginning anew, Monty’s student meetings at the college became more frequent, and Andy’s attendance rate grew, no longer hinging upon what refreshments they were serving. The SDS welcomed Andy’s fresh face, always seeking enthusiastic, young regulars to their meetings, and soon he went from blending into the folding chairs at the back of the room to truly listening to the group’s ideals and goals, and then finally to speaking up himself, letting his own thoughts be heard.

The students--and some, like Monty, who were a little past that stage in their lives--stressed that their stance wasn’t about being anti-government, or even anti-war, though Andy couldn’t fathom how people his age would be for this war in the first place. What brought Andy in was their message of democracy, of equality in all of America. The group always made strong, convincing arguments about the misrepresented, undervalued youth, leaving Andy with his mind as well as his stomach full after each meeting.

They were left with no say in America launching into this war, Andy wrote, yet they were the ones forced out on the frontlines, men like Neal who should have been home, making music; wasting time. They couldn’t vote, but they could die.

Andy really wished he could scratch out the last line, the thoughts he had in those meetings bleeding onto the page; death didn’t belong in these letters to Neal, Andy had no right in sending it when he’d be surrounded by it all anyway. But he left it in, hoping Neal would not be fazed by a small transgression; a promise, after all, was a promise.

> _The volunteer work with the group’s been keeping me pretty busy, setting up petitions and calling Congressmen and shit. Everything makes me feel like I’m just spinning my wheels here--especially since all this SDS stuff is trying to get you home, and you’re not--but at least I’m doing something to fill the time, instead of staring at the walls for hours. (Yeah, I was doing that for a little while. Had to convince Mom and Dad I wasn’t on drugs.)_
> 
> _It is filling the time, I guess, but...it’s not helping me feel any better about all this. That sense I got the first time you left--the feeling like something’s all wrong but no one else gets it--hit me again about a week ago, hard. The days aren’t the only things that feel empty around here. I keep thinking, maybe if I throw myself into this more, spend more hours with Monty at the university, really get into working there...it’ll stop that feeling. I know it won’t make it go away, I just need it to make this all hurt less. So I can stop staring at walls and remembering wasting time with you._
> 
> _I think there’s only one thing that’d make that empty feeling go away._

Andy’s mouth deepened into a frustrated scowl the moment his pen lifted from the page. With few other alternatives he crumpled the paper furiously in his hands, curling it into a ball and chucking it, aiming for the walls he watched when thinking of Neal’s touch. It was everything and nothing he wanted to write, all down in his own hand, the line between what he should and what he desired blurring with every paragraph. He spent so much time the past month decimating those lines, he forgot how to build them back up again. 

The arcing ball of paper caught his eye as it flew through the air, landing in the far corner of his bedroom, smacking squarely against a familiar black case propped up against the wall. The frustration in his veins quickly cooled; Andy let out a deep breath as his eyes lit upon Neal’s guitar, safe inside its home. Its well-being was once again under his charge, cleaning and polishing it like Neal had asked, caring for it like it was his own. But just two weeks ago it was still Neal’s, beloved and perfect in Neal’s skilled hands, expert fingers bending and coaxing the strings to his will, grinding out so much more than simple notes from some carved, hollow wood. Just the sight of the case brought back memories to Andy, the late nights in his garage, practicing until they could barely keep their eyes open.

He sighed, the emotions deflating him, once again leaving his body feeling empty. Rising from his chair he picked up the paper from where it had dropped, cupping it in his palms like a dried, preserved blossom, and unfolded the page, smoothing out the damage he inflicted, undoing his wrong. It was still tattered and beaten, there was no escaping that, but the words were still intact, the letter still whole.

Before he could lose his nerve once again Andy sheathed the letter into its envelope, the address to Neal’s Texas base already printed. With a quick thought he reached for something else on his desk to slip into the envelope; he took one lingering glance at the photograph in his hands, a smile playing on his face, before he flipped it over and scrawled a note on the back. He would have included something in the letter itself, hoping that Neal would appreciate the picture, but Andy already had a feeling that he’d appreciate it just fine.

  
***  


>   
> _Was developing a roll of film this week when I found this on the reel. Don’t know how it got there. Maybe you know?_
> 
> _APS_  
> 

Neal held the little snapshot in his hands, gripping it tight so his fingers didn’t tremble, focusing on the photograph instead of containing the grin spreading on his face. Staring back at him was a peaceful pose, the close-up of Andy’s face holding nothing but the serenity they shared a month before. Eyes closed, lashes brushing against the top of his cheeks, the photograph felt so lifelike to Neal he could almost see Andy’s chest rise and fall with each breath, slow and methodical in slumber. 

It had been an early morning, the purplish shadows cast about the background reminding Neal he had awoken before dawn. Andy’s Nikon had been right there on the bedside table, close enough for Neal to snatch it without disturbing the sleeping best friend by his side. He hadn’t known shit about cameras but he found it far easier to fudge than playing the guitar: a few clicks of a dial, a glance in the viewfinder, and Neal felt like his very own Stieglitz.

He felt a tug at his chest, the sudden, rushing desire to be back home, stronger than usual, if only to share his smile with Andy and tell him his camera must’ve been malfunctioning. The single, still photograph wasn’t nearly enough but it had to be for now, the picture becoming the closest thing to home Neal could reach. Very carefully he placed it in the pocket of his shirt, making sure not to make it crease or bend. He knew he couldn’t keep it out near his bunk, so many fellow grunts taping up keepsakes of their sweethearts to fall asleep or jerk off to, whichever was more desirable at the time.

Neal snickered at his own train of thought, finding it tough to determine which of those choices he’d like to use this photograph for most.

But in another breath the smile faded, the nostalgia gone. Yes, the letter got to him, and he was thankful to whatever desk clerk had the brains to send it on from Texas, but the carefree tour Andy wished him in those pages was now empty hope, scattered to the South Asian seas. He might have had an easy time regrouping at an army base safe on American soil, but this was Vietnam, and it was no fucking picnic.

And the Vietnam and he and David returned to was certainly not the same one they had left. A month’s worth of leave felt too short on their end, but it was more than enough time for the war to change the atmosphere within the country. Everything that had been exotic and new was now tarnished, the endless jungles razed and burned, ancient dirt-path roads widened with Jeep tracks and cordoned off with coils of barbed wire.

Even the soldiers lost any shine left to them, the military base short on equipment and supplies as well as courage and hope. Most of the grunts left on the base had been out in combat for too long, the resources of the army stretching thin and supplying few replacements. The new recruits that did show up, unaccustomed to the ruthlessness of war, didn’t last for long. Neal hadn’t realized how much good his free leave had done him until he looked into the eyes of a soldier who had none. He found them free not only of fear but of any sympathy. Vietnam had sucked the life out of these poor fuckers.

What a great time, he thought, attempting David’s levity, to be back in the thick of it.

Both he and David were coping as best they could, the first week spent trying hard to hide the cleanliness of their uniforms, the shine to their boots. Other soldiers didn’t take kindly to finding out David had spent Christmas with his family, or Neal celebrated his birthday by sleeping in an actual bed. They were in a strange, unique position: not the new grunts who jumped at the sound of machine gun fire, too green to even watch their step among the landmines; but not like those men paying their dues, far from the thoughts of warm beds and loved ones. Even most of the officers took one look at the pair, their stories already known, and wondered how they ever left home to come back to this hell.

Twelve days in and Neal was wondering the same thing.

David, unequivocally the optimist of the pair, had a harder time adjusting to the muted atmosphere of the base. What had once sparked life in his fellow soldiers now fell upon cold, deaf ears, the rolling eyes and smiles replaced with empty glares in his direction. One morning after a night mission, he tried to lighten the heavy fog surrounding the unit by telling a story. His eyes smiling and his grin wide, David’s spirit was infectious to Neal, neglecting cleaning his weapon for the few moments while his friend spoke. David was always good at telling stories.

“Man, we had one of these patrol nights before--real bad night, no one got any rest. Came back into base, everyone was so exhausted you could knock the whole unit right over with a feather.” No one had a feather handy, so David held his fingers up delicately, miming waving an invisible one, and faking being stunned by the sudden wind. Neal chuckled, leaning his weight onto his propped-up rifle, already knowing the end of the story, but the rest of the group was silent. Not everyone had a taste for the Cook humor.

“So we’re all ready to just pass out, get mistaken for a bunch of DBs that wandered into base and all collapsed in the middle of camp...” Neal overheard a rookie grunt, not three days in country, timidly ask another soldier about the abbreviation; without hesitation or emotion the other man told him it meant dead bodies, a term commonly used among the military, so nonchalant it was as if they discussed the weather. The rookie, his eyes wide, smartly shut his mouth.

Laughing at his own joke before he could tell it, David continued, unfazed. “And a damn lieutenant comes up to us, full of shit stirrin’ fire, red up to the tips of his ears. He thinks we’re just going out to a patrol and complaining about it! So Yeager, he’s the only one with the balls to remind the guy--”

A swift hand fell upon his shoulder, the commander coming up behind David, who was too engrossed in his story to notice. Bryan Jewett held no smile on his face when he calmly told David storytime was over.

His brows stitched into confusion, David took a glance at Bryan’s expression, somber but sympathetic, before looking back over at his audience. Every soldier was eerily silent around them, hearing David’s words but giving no intention of entertaining his story. Neal watched intently, his attentions grabbed more than from the story, wondering what could have brought his two friends in the field into conflict.

“What?” he turned back to Bryan; his tales had always been hits before. “I don’t...”

But once again Bryan cut him off; he was direct and succinct, and David knew he was completely serious. “Yeager’s dead,” he informed them, and the smile immediately dropped from David’s face. “Got ambushed by some village kids we thought were friendlies, ‘bout a week after you left.”

Bryan’s eyes scanned the looks of horror on David and Neal’s faces, the last bit of fresh, free American air forced out of their lungs. They couldn’t hold onto the safe memories of their leave anymore, act like they were just shooting the breeze with their friends outside of a drive-in. This was Vietnam, and the soldiers who were their friends were already lost; here, they shot more than just the breeze.

“That’s why we don’t tell stories about him anymore,” Bryan said, the conversation ended, the tale left unfinished. With a wave of his rifle he sent the other soldiers scattering, and left Neal and David to their own thoughts.

“ _Shit_ ,” Neal said in shock, his forehead in his palm, his head shaking. “Yeager’s dead. Knew he wasn’t around, but I just thought he got shipped back home, his time was up...” He bit his lip then, feeling the slowly healing holes where his piercings should have been. Neal supposed Yeager’s time had been up but not in the way anyone had wished for. And he had been shipped home, but instead of returning in first class to his hopeful, happy wife, it was in a flag-draped box.

Neal had been stunned by the news, but David’s eyes flashed red at the man he called his best friend. “His name was _Jason_ ,” he spat out at Neal, stalking over until he was towering over Neal’s seated frame. “He loved his wife. He loved his family. And I almost joked about him taking a piss on the lieutenant’s boots.” His hands clenched into fists at his sides, and if he didn’t know him so well Neal would have thought David was going to hit him. David told him later that day he almost did. “I didn’t even know he died, no one told us, no one said a thing. But now that we do, you show some goddamned respect.”

When he walked away, his tempers raised like Neal had never seen them before, David kept a fast pace all the way back to base, making sure any possibility of Neal following him would be slower than the tears falling down his face.

  
***  


They never spoke again of the incident, though later that afternoon David proposed a man’s apology to Neal, grunting and bumping fists until the matter was settled and they both went off to dinner. David’s behavior hadn’t been what unnerved Neal: he had always been the rare blend of an emotional and effective soldier, never hesitant to show fear,yet combating the odds and powering through his duty. None of that had changed over the free leave; Neal would have said it only strengthened David’s emotions, keeping them burning hot, now lashing out with anger as well as sadness.

No, what surprised Neal, leaving him uneasy since their first week back in country, was how Bryan had changed. Once ever joyful in Tulsa, always up for a good laugh or a good drink, Bryan, like the other soldiers Neal encountered on base, seemed to lose his shine, his will to find that joy in the world. Perhaps it had been knowing how Bryan acted in civilian life that skewed Neal’s memory, but he could swear the impact of the war hit Bryan harder than the others. A grim scowl tattooed on his face, rarely ever cracking a smile, he was even more attuned to the life of a soldier than when David and Neal left. Laughter was pushed aside for survival skills; holding an M-16 became more natural to him than holding a guitar. Neal shuddered even at the thought, and reminded himself to tell David if he ever forgot how a guitar felt in his hands, David should shoot him.

Bryan refused to listen to stories of home, the tales Neal had brought back with him of the friends they had left behind in Tulsa. Neal had bristled at the rejection, quick to temper when it came to defending his friends, but he soon realized, after watching all the soldiers sort through letters on mail day, his own letter from Andy at the top of the pile, that Bryan received none.

“When you first get out here, you think everything’ll be the same,” he told Neal, a rare moment when he let his guard down on base; even at times of ease Bryan paid into the soldier’s lifestyle, never resting, never leaving himself vulnerable. When he shut all that down Neal could see the man he used to be, a weight off his shoulders, but only barely. “Hold your nose and wade through the shit, come home, and everything will be waiting for you--friends, family, your favorite television show--like you never left.”

He took a deep sigh, eyeing the letter in Neal’s lap; then back at his own hands, which cradled his M-16. Filthy with jungle mud and machine gun oil, Bryan knew any letter that fell into those hands would be sullied, the clean, white, perfect paper forever ruined. “But after a few weeks you stop caring about that show, or whatever the fuck you’re missing on television. And after a few months, not much else seems to matter, either. Those friends you thought would be back home like you never left...well, they’re still there, but it’s more like you never existed.”

Neal swallowed, forcing down the lump in his throat and the chills prickling his skin over how easy it was for Bryan to dismiss the world he left behind. Still, he remembered how it felt to be back with his old friends, drinking, living like nothing had changed. But Neal had changed, forged by months of experiences he could never forget.

“It’s easy to forget when you’re not there,” he told Bryan, who silently nodded, his steely stare gazing into the distance; maybe wishing he could see all the way to Oklahoma, Neal thought. He kept the remark open-ended; it was easy for their friends not to dwell on a fate they so narrowly avoided. But the distance also made Bryan’s memory fade, his desire to get home waning with every detail of that home he overlooked.

He stayed in country any longer, and Bryan wouldn’t want to go back to the home that forgot he was even alive.

As Bryan returned to his duties, their conversation abruptly ended with a dismissing wave of his hand, Neal released the cold shudder he had been storing in his body. He watched his future march off to the barracks, the kind of life that awaited him if he stayed too long in country. Being a soldier could make you strong, mold you into the man every boy has the potential to become. But it also could leave you cold, take your mind as well as your body from the only home you knew, the things you loved the most. It was a dark turn Neal watched many of his fellow grunts make, and it was a path he did not wish to follow.

But the letter in his held him back from that dark, dangerous road; the words he knew he’d find on the pages, the notes of songs and the meanings that laid within. Andy never forgot Neal while he was away, always sending letters, songs; the photograph that burned in Neal’s shirt pocket. Unconsciously Neal’s hand rose to his pocket, feeling the hard yet pliant photo paper through the canvas. And he would never forget Andy, who, though a thousand miles and a world away, was as close to Neal as his words on the page, the sharp memories of a song.

A soldier needed something to pull him back from the endless months of combat he endured; some light at the end of this long, dark tunnel that made him want to fight and stay alive. Neal had not yet been back two weeks in a six-month tour extension; he gripped Andy’s letter tightly in his hands, smearing the envelope with dirt he could never seem to wash clean, and hoped it would be enough.


	18. Chapter 18

>   
> _March 1, 1969_
> 
> _Guess who’s moving to New York?_
> 
> _No, not me, ya dingus. I’ve still got a few months left in school, though trust me, I’ve been counting the days (and the hours, and the minutes...it’s getting worse with the nicer weather, who knows how long I’ll have to enjoy that). And I’ve got to stay in school, no matter how soul-crushingly boring it is there, or else Uncle Sam’ll catch word of me dropping out and I’ll get a draft card underneath my pillow like the tooth fairy. Plus you know my parents would kill me, my mom’s not quite ready for a completely empty nest just yet._
> 
> _We got the call from Alexis a few weeks ago; her classes are going well in New York, so well in fact that she’s looking to stay there over the summer, and look for a permanent apartment. She’s only been there for a semester so far but she says she’s fallen in love with the city, it’s so different than anything we’ve got here in Tulsa. (Now that, I can believe. Hell, even watching The Odd Couple I can tell it’s nothing like Tulsa.) She’s sent some of her photography work back to us, too, and right from there I can tell there’s so much character on every street, so much life...and I can tell she’s loving every little bit of it._
> 
> _I think I’m going to like it a lot, too._
> 
> _See, I’m writing this to you in the airport right now; I couldn’t find much of the time this week with making the arrangements and packing. I’m spending the spring break week visiting her in New York, seeing the sights, getting a feel for someplace new. (I guess I should’ve started the letter off like that, I mean, why else would I spend so much time telling you Alexis is staying in New York? I know all you care about is hearing about my life. I know how it goes.)_
> 
> _I’m excited, to say the least. I guess that’s why I’m spending all this time waiting in the airport writing you this letter, I can’t just sit still, read a book before we board. And it’s not just seeing New York, though that’s a big chunk of it, especially after how much Lexie’s raved about the town. I’m just excited to get on a plane and get out of Tulsa, see something other than our own backyard. Haven’t been on a plane since we moved out here; has to be over a decade by now. (It’ll be a bit different than the flight you described when you went to Vietnam: for one, they won’t have me strapped down in the cargo bay of some giant military plane, flying silent for hours as I’m carted halfway across the world. And secondly, I think they’re gonna give me peanuts.)_
> 
> _I really needed to get out of Tulsa, Neal, if only for the week. There’s still that feeling there, the one where everything feels wrong but no one notices it except for me; it’s come back double now that you’re gone and I can’t get my head around it. Hopefully the change in scenery--especially such a great scene!--will get me out of the mindframe of feeling like you’re missing, and more thinking about wishing you were here._
> 
> _Or, there, seeing as I’m not actually there yet myself. Though I wish you were here, too, then the stewardess wouldn’t keep throwing me weird looks over at the gate. Or maybe she’d be giving even more._
> 
> _But yeah, I really do with you were going to be there with me this week. I think the scene would suit you; no one cares about tattoos, or piercings there, no one thinks you’re worshipping the devil if you listen to Jim Morrison. There are so many people you’ve got to fit in with a few of them. (You think your snakebites are wild; Alexis just sent us a photo of her with a stud in her nose. Dad kept wiping at the picture for five straight minutes until he realized it wasn’t dirt on the lens!) I’ll send lots of postcards, though, and take as many pictures as my camera can hold. I want to try my best to make you feel like you’re there with me._
> 
> _And forget about all the rest in New York, the Empire State Building and whatever the hell else they have there are all fine and good, but the music scene there...oh, man, I know that’s what you’d really miss. The way Lexie tells it, there’s no barrier in the arts, everything and everyone mixes, learns from each other, perfects their craft. And everything is right there, all around you, all the time: so many great musicians living in one city, one neighborhood, they’re all probably neighbors. (Can you imagine being Dylan’s neighbor? Just opening up your door one day and he’s asking to borrow a cup of sugar. Though knowing all those artists it probably wouldn’t be sugar he’s asking for.) She says it’s an amazing feeling, knowing you’re walking around and living with greatness, experiencing music all around you instead of getting it bottled in your radio or at a concert. And she’s not even a musician, and she gets it like that. I can’t even imagine what it’d be like for the both of us._
> 
> _I’ve already told Lexie ahead of time, the touristy things are great, sure; send me to the Statue of Liberty to get a shot for mom’s scrapbook. But I really want to dig deep into the music, go to as many bars and nightclubs I can get into, take in and listen to everything. It’s not just about hearing the music and seeing some greats on stage--Lexie says some just show up at clubs and start playing, she saw Joan Baez at Gerde’s the first week she got into town--but to learn from them, too. Get some onstage ideas, get a little more into the technical parts, our crappy amps at home can only take us so far...and management, and the business of music, too. This has got to be helpful at least with how to get on that stage instead of just standing in front of it. It’s a vacation, definitely, but I’m planning to make it a working holiday._
> 
> _I can already see you rolling your eyes all the way from Vietnam. (Yes, I’m that good.) Don’t act like none of this is worth it, like the offer at the Flytrap means it’s over for us. We’ll have other offers, I’m sure of it; and if there aren’t any, then I’m gonna work my ass off to make sure we’re out there and they’re fucking pounding on our door. It’s not over just because you’re in the war. All of this--the music, your guitar--it’ll be waiting for you when you get home, to start off just where we left off._
> 
> _And I’ll be here, too; you can always count on that._
> 
> _This is our dream, Neal; this is where we’re supposed to be heading. I knew it the minute I looked over at you on that stage in December and watched you take it all in. Fuck this war; fuck the draft. We’re gonna make it there, just you wait._
> 
> _Shit, they’re starting to board now, and I haven’t even had time to check out the magazines at the newsstand. Guess I’ve got to get this in the airport post before it flies with me to New York. But if I see Hendrix ordering a pizza pie in Greenwich Village, I’ll tell him you said hi._
> 
> _Andy_   
> 

***

“Welcome to New York, kid brother!”

Grinning, Andy rolled his eyes at the woman who greeted him at the airport gate, with matching colored eyes, a matching smile, and a large cardboard sign with “A P SKIB” scrawled out in bold, black letters. “Thanks, Lex,” his voice dripped with as much sarcasm as jet lag would allow, “For making me feel like I’m nine.” He hugged his sister despite all this, scooping her up in a warm embrace, happy to be back on the ground and in loving company.

“I don’t think I can do that anymore,” Alexis countered, giving him another squeeze in her arms before holding Andy out at arm’s length, eyeing him up and down. “You look like you gained another inch or two since Christmas! ‘Kid’ brother, no more.”

“Probably ‘cause of this,” Andy said as he ran his hand over his spiky hair.

Alexis shook her head, aware for years now of her brother’s many attempts to be cool. “That’ll never do,” she remarked. “Too short, too controlled. You _scream_ Midwest farmboy.” Andy frowned, opening his mouth to remind her that their parents were _doctors_ , and he was born in _San Diego_ , thank you very much. But a playful poke in his side told him his sister was toying with him. “You’re in New York now, Andy; time to let yourself free!”

Alexis had certainly taken her own advice since moving to the city: only a few months into her studies in New York and she had changed her entire style, letting her dark brown hair grow long and fall freely down her back, switching out her jeans and t-shirts for peasant blouses and flowing, bohemian skirts. Andy wasn’t going to curb her spirit, nor admit to looking at his sister’s legs, but he swore he noticed that Alexis stopped shaving.

One of the first things Alexis noticed--while the two siblings waited at the baggage carousel, Andy procuring only one of the suitcases circulating on the conveyor belt--she did not keep to herself. “No guitar?” she asked as they left the terminal and hailed a cab. “I thought it was attached to your hip.”

A bright yellow taxi pulled up in front of the terminal, and after Alexis quickly haggled with the driver on the price to take them back into Manhattan she instructed Andy to stow his suitcase and get in the backseat. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me take it,” he explained. He had put up quite the argument when the decision came down, that if New York was the cultural and creative epicenter Alexis described it to be, he would be frustrated and lost without his guitar, like a writer in a sea of words without any pen. But a quick reminder of whose name was on the guitar’s bill of sale ended the discussion. “Said it’s too expensive to replace if the airline ended up breaking it.”

“What about Neal’s?” There was a hint of a smile on her face as the taxi started its journey. “That guitar’s attached to your other hip.”

Andy laughed. “You’d have to replace my head if I broke that one.”

But he did show her the Nikon he brought with him, tucked carefully away in his satchel, and Alexis nodded approvingly, watching with the amusement of a local as her brother spent the rest of the ride taking pictures of the skyline out the speeding taxi window. He had never seen anything like it before, the sprawling, endless urban landscape stretching over hills and pouring into the rivers. It was certainly a departure from Tulsa, whose downtown area could span the distance between Andy’s forefinger and thumb, most of the world existing in suburban tract homes instead of apartments.

And one particular apartment, over the bridge into Manhattan, currently housed his older sister, and would be his own home for the week. Andy was already lost in the labyrinth of skyscrapers and crowded streets by the time the taxi slowed to its final destination. Alexis approached a narrow, red-bricked tenement sandwiched among a row of identical buildings, all running down the narrow, winding street, with Andy following closely behind, careful not to lose his one link in a strange city, even for a few feet. An alley cat napped in the doorway of the Italian restaurant on the ground floor, which Alexis divulged was the biggest culprit for making her a pasta addict.

The apartment--up four flights of a narrow stairway, which would have been nice for Alexis to mention before Andy packed his large, cumbersome suitcase and was now struggling with it on each landing--was small, but cozy, and Alexis’s decoration instincts made him instantly feel at home. Around every corner of the apartment there were baubles and knick-knacks, both from Tulsa and New York, filling the space with the familiar, lived-in feeling Andy had every time he walked into their own home, without being cluttered or out of place. A futon--which Andy assumed would be his bed for the week--stretched out at the head of a large Oriental rug in the livingroom, dampening the sounds of their shoes on the hardwood floors.

“My room,” Alexis pointed down a short hallway, with two doors flanking its sides and one at the end. She swept her arm to indicate the door across from hers. “Roomie’s room. Bathroom.” The third door at the end of the hall was her last stop on the short tour. “Don’t mix them up at night. Not gonna explain _that_ to Kris.”

Alexis’s roommate--whom Andy had only met through his sister’s descriptions in her letters--already made his presence known in the apartment by the beat-up men’s sneakers sitting next to delicate sandals in the entranceway, and the framed photo of a French bulldog hanging on the wall that was definitely not one of the Skib family dachshunds. But what stood out to Andy the most was the soft canvas case resting against the back of the futon, the familiar shape immediately giving away its contents.

Andy’s eyes widened, his fingers instinctively itching to reach out and touch, examine. “You didn’t tell me he _played,_ ” he said, pointing to the case, mustering enough musician’s etiquette not to scoop up another man’s instrument for himself. Alexis shrugged and said she must have missed that detail, admitting she had been deliberately vague on her roommate to avoid further questions from their parents.

“I’m half convinced they think he’s really Kristina,” she said, as the roommate in question emerged from his room for a hello.

Kris Allen certainly wasn’t what Andy had been expecting: short and wiry, Kris seemed to be the perfect companion to the French bulldog in the photograph, with an energy evident in the bounce of his sneakers as he rounded the corner into the living room. Alexis introduced him, mentioning that they had met when they both sought to rent the apartment but realized neither student could afford it on their own. She nearly managed Andy’s introduction before her brother beat her to the punch, simultaneously stepping forward, hand outstretched for a handshake, and pointing to the case against the futon.

“Is that what I think it is?” Andy asked, his eyes sparked with excitement.

Smiling, Kris nodded over towards the guitar, a friendship already formed before they even said hello. “Couldn’t get through much of college without it.”

In a few minutes’ time they talked like old friends, the universal bond of music introducing them even without Alexis’s help. Andy quickly learned that, just as Alexis came to New York for her photography, Kris had enrolled in college for music, and was finding inspiration all over the streets of the city. Raised in the suburbs of Arkansas, Kris easily bonded with the siblings over the small-town differences from the big city he now called home; though, Andy noted, from the relaxed drawl in Kris’s voice and his penchant for plaid, Kris hadn’t assimilated to the New York lifestyle as readily as Alexis.

Once the guitar was released from its case--a warm, walnut finish Gibson that Kris custom-stained red--simply talking about music gave way to the music itself, the notes echoing through the apartment speaking more words than the two musicians ever could. Kris’s music was slow and lilting, letting the emotions in each note linger and swell against his drawl and the strum of his fingers. It was so different from the music Neal and Andy wrote, compounding the lyrics and notes into a hard, overwhelming drive, layering each emotion underneath drum beats and heavy guitars, letting it run like a car speeding across Oklahoma without anywhere to go. Andy liked the soft simplicity of Kris’s songs, fueled just by a guitar and a voice, but it would never be like Neal’s.

Kris readily handed over the guitar to Andy when he saw the anxious way he eyed the instrument, knowing it would be a week until he was reunited with his own. By the time Alexis ordered takeout Chinese food for the trio--a first for Andy, who relished in the greasy, sticky-sweet food once he managed to spear some of it onto his chopstick--Andy was already dipping into Neal’s song collection, Kris’s guitar playing sweetly in his hands but missing something without Neal’s harmony. When he looked back up after the final chord of a song, he spied Alexis’s beaming, supportive smile, and Kris’s methodical nod, his eyes locked in awe. Andy realized it was the first time he was playing with more than himself in the room since their night at the Flytrap.

As he went to bed that night, lying on the lumpy futon mattress, driven from sleep by the incessant sounds of a foreign city all around him, Andy remembered that night after Christmas, mentally inserting Neal’s guitar, his harmonic voice, to the songs he played that evening, and it made him feel a little bit more at home.

***

“So this is...um.” Kris’s mouth quirked to the side as he furrowed his brow in concentration. “It’s a building.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Andy replied, both of their chins pointing towards the clouds, their eyes trying to focus on the top of a building that seemed to pierce that very sky.

“No! I mean,” Kris shook his head. “It’s famous, or something. Not _old_ famous, obviously, but, you know--” he waved his arms, gesturing ineffectively, failing at his description. He was a music major, after all, not architecture. “ _Big_ famous.”

Andy arched an eyebrow at his companion. “You’re not very good at this tour guide thing, are you, Kris.” While Andy reveled in his week away from high school, his spring break vacation didn’t coordinate with the colleges in New York City, and apologetically Alexis had class for most of the day. Finding his schedule clear, Kris volunteered to show their guest around Manhattan and promised his roommate he would not misplace her baby brother.

But, after catching sight of an ignored juggler in Union Square, circling the same hot dog stand three times, and being propositioned for nearly every illegal act Andy could think of in Washington Square Park, the pair were starting to wonder if Kris leading the sightseeing was a very good idea. Andy made a mental note to mention this later to Alexis, who, on their mother’s request, had a detailed list of the attractions Andy should see, lest she be deeply disappointed in sending him in the first place.

Kris pouted, his eyes still on the building in front of them. “Well, I’m still pretty new at being a New Yorker myself,” he reasoned. “And most of what I see is the inside of rehearsal rooms.”

Andy’s ears perked at the mention of rehearsal spaces, a tiny part of the world of New York music where Kris dwelled, more important than addresses or street intersections. There were some things Andy wished to see that weren’t on a typical tourist’s list.

“You know, skyscrapers are great and all,” he said, looking at Kris from the corner of his eye, feet tapping anxiously on the pavement. “And you’ve sure got a lot of them in this city. But...to tell you the truth?” He shrugged, in disbelief that he stood in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world, bored out of his damn skull. “I didn’t come to New York to stare at a shitload of buildings.”

Breaking his sullen mood over his tour guide failure, Kris couldn’t help but laugh, agreeing with Andy that their morning in Manhattan hadn’t been ideal. “You got any other suggestions?” he asked. The weather was unseasonably warm for a March morning not yet even firmly planted into spring; it would be a waste not to spend the time wisely. “I doubt your sister’d be okay with letting you watch The Guiding Light all day...”

Andy’s eyes trailed back to the building, its sleek, imposing exterior cutting a deep line through the sky. Tulsa didn’t have anything close to these behemoths, the small cluster of skyscrapers downtown barely making a dent in the endless flat landscape, the earth easily stretching out farther than the buildings could stretch up. But even a sight that a wide-eyed teenager would find impressive was lost on Andy, the facade of concrete, metal and glass missing one core element: _life_.

He thought of the buskers he noticed in the park when they breezed through, musicians with nothing more but a battered guitar, a filthy, worn hat to hold tips, and a Byrds cover song on the air. Kris had told him he tried that lifestyle once, just for the experience, but after he used his day’s earnings to buy a round of beer, he watched his competitor in the Astor Place subway curl up on the wooden benches, his bed for the night. Now, Kris kept his music to more legitimate avenues, and whenever he saw an old guitar and a sliver of hope on the street, he always bought the poor soul a meal.

“I don’t want to just see this city; that’s only one side of it. I want to _experience_ it, too.”

There was a ghost of a smile on Kris’s face when he answered, a plan already spinning in his mind. “Think I can arrange something,” he said, digging into his pocket for a dime. “I’ll call Jason, see if there’s anything to scrounge up...”

Andy took one last look at the skyscraper before him, a monument of steel and human will reaching up to the heavens. Remembering his promise, he raised the camera slung around his neck to eye level, adjusting the lens in an attempt to get at least some of the building in focus, and fired off a few shots with the press of a button and a tiny mechanical _click_. “It  is a pretty nice building,” he admitted as Kris called his contact. Later, when Andy would hole up in their bathroom-turned-darkroom developing the roll, Alexis would catch a peek at his series and ask why he took more pictures of an insurance company than the Empire State Building.

***

Reliably, Kris’s contacts came through, and within an hour of his phone call he and Andy were making their way west to MacDougal Street, past an eclectic variety of college bars and exotic head shops, and up to a third-floor apartment overlooking the avenue. Jason was a friend of his, Kris explained, in his last year of college, who made extra cash growing and trading in the very commodity Kris sought to enhance Andy’s New York experience. He and his roommate, however, were more serious about the music they made than whatever they discreetly grew on their fire escape, and smoked or gave away more than they sold. Although Andy informed Kris that they get their pot just fine back in Tulsa, Kris insisted on treating him, the visit as much a social call as it is a business transaction.

He stopped just before opening the apartment door, his hand hovering inches from the doorknob. “Bryce and Jason are a little...weird,” Kris said, his face marking his hesitation. “Are you okay with weird?”

With what he had seen so far that day, Andy wasn’t quite sure what constituted “weird” in New York City. But, he figured, they were all musicians, who as a collective always shared some eccentricities. Hell, he was sure more than a few native New Yorkers would have considered Neal weird. He shrugged, indifferent, and eager to get out of the hallway. “Well, we’re all weird, aren’t we?”

Though rhetorical, Kris furrowed his brow in thought for a moment, rolling over Andy’s statement in his head before saying to himself, “Yeah...yeah, I guess we are.”

Without further hesitation he opened the door to the unmistakable sights and smells of two young men living in an apartment without someone else to clean up after them. Dishes filled the kitchen sink on one end of the main room while sheet music, notes, and yellowing paperbacks littered the top of what must have been a coffee table at the other. A large terrace window opened up to the street, flooding the apartment with light, the potted plants flourishing on the fire escape ignored by an indifferent city. And in the middle of it all were two blond men--one long and sinewy, matching the rest of him, the other shorter in both hair and stature--in deep conversation on the couch, a guitar in one’s hands and a notepad of scribbled sheet music in the other’s.

When they noticed the two visitors standing in the entranceway, the guitarist’s face broke out into a grin, quickly shedding the instrument from his shoulders and bounding over to greet them, while the scribe made sure the discarded guitar’s neck didn’t dip into the full ashtray on the table, its contents still smoldering.

Andy quickly learned through spirited introductions that the guitarist was Kris’s friend Jason, and the writer his roommate Bryce, who excelled at the bass--an instrument Andy initially underestimated, but reconsidered after a trial by fire, when enough laughs and liquor and pot had circulated that afternoon for Bryce to let him have a try. Much like with Kris they warmed instantly to Andy, their shared love of music bringing the four men together when they would normally have never met. The afternoon was spent with good music, good smoke and good company: Andy sat as if in college lecture, listening intently to Jason and Bryce’s tales of the Manhattan music clubs, hoping to learn from their experience and age. With four years in New York under their belts, the two older men had seen and lived more of what the music scene had to offer those with just a guitar and a prayer; they had been around the block more than a few times, seeking an audience once school ended, and Andy looked to absorb as much knowledge as he could.

“You’re going about it a good way,” Jason commented, after Andy revealed his intentions for the week. “It’s all about the different avenues you can make for yourself; gaining those connections, making friends.”

“Doing a damn good job of it right now,” chimed in Bryce, and, finding this to be the most hilarious thing he had heard all afternoon, Kris coughed out the smoke he was holding in his breath and erupted into giggles.

“But that’s not all you need. You could be Dick Clark’s nephew and it wouldn’t matter; you still gotta have the talent to back it all up.” Jason took a quick hit of a joint before passing it into Andy’s waiting hands, returning his fingers’ focus to the guitar in his lap. “You think you’ve got what it takes?”

Andy tried to hide his grin as his thoughts drifted elsewhere, to the friend and creative partner he did all of this for, what he hoped to create for them once Neal came home. “I’m not the talented one,” he demurred; he had a voice, or so Neal liked to mention, and he was passable on the guitar, but he knew the true powerhouse behind their music was half a world away, wasting a musician’s hands on a machine gun, writing down his brilliance on cheap military grade paper. “You’ll see.”

Their conversations rooted firmly in music for most of the afternoon, with divergences into different guitars the four men coveted, a quick digression into impromptu songwriting, and an invite to a concert later that night, to which Andy immediately RSVP’ed. Even regardless of the drug-induced relaxation, Jason and Bryce were a fun, easygoing pair, Andy thought, and he found himself making fast friends. He still wasn’t sure why Kris had warned him of their oddities; he had yet to see any behavior in either of them that would make anyone regard them as “weird.”

But the topic of their talk, as did all conversations among draft-age young men left in the country, inevitably turned to the war.

The joint’s side effects finally taking their toll on Kris, he insisted they find themselves some dinner, and within minutes Andy was biting into his first slice of New York pizza, the gooey cheese scorching the roof of his mouth and sliding down his throat. “You have the best ideas ever, Kris,” he tried to say, but with a mouth full of cheese and tomato sauce it came out a string of mumbles, and he chuckled at his own incoherence.

After the table’s laughter subsided and they asked Andy to repeat himself, Andy found the words on the tip of his tongue but unable to come out from his mouth. Standing at the counter of the pizzeria, the chrome countertops mirroring his image like a reflecting pool, stood a man with a large afro and bell-bottom jeans calmly blowing on his pepperoni slice, oblivious to his sudden teenage voyeur. He was about six inches too short and looked nothing like Hendrix, Andy noted, but the coincidence hit him in all the right places. He put down his slice and picked up his camera, the table’s conversation stemming to a halt as they watched the tourist in their midst take a few shots of an eccentric stranger in a West Village pizzeria.

When he noticed the three pairs of eyes on him, Andy blushed, hiding his grin behind the Nikon. “It’s...an inside joke,” he divulged, after Kris playfully kicked him underneath the table. “For Neal. It might not make sense to you, but...he’ll get it.” Andy couldn’t stop the smile spreading on his face as he told his three new friends about his best friend, how all his research into the music scene was worth nothing without Neal on the other end of the stage with him. But that smile faltered as he explained Neal’s absence, the call of duty unfortunately more pressing than the lure of the stage lights. He hadn’t said to anyone since Neal’s departure how the loss affected him, how he missed even the innocent laughs and smiles, let alone the private moments they shared. He didn’t notice how much it weighed on him until the words “I miss him” passed his lips, revealing to three men he just met what he kept within him for months.

His eyes dropping to the half-eaten slice on his plate, Andy missed the questioning looks thrown over his head by Jason and Bryce, Jason incredulously mouthing the words “Best friend?” to Kris, who nodded his head, an answer to a question unspoken. Bryce took the opportunity to sympathize, ducking his head in a conspirational tone. “I know what you mean,” he told Andy, slipping a friendly arm around Jason’s shoulders, feigning a headlock. “It’s why I’m dragging this one back to Canada with me.”

Andy’s ears perked at the mention of Canada, more well-known to him as a haven for American draft dodgers than a tourist destination. He had heard the rumors swirling around the SDS meeting rooms, caught sight of the pamphlets surreptitiously passed around to unlucky draftees; hell, he even suggested it to Neal in a last-minute act of desperation at the bus station. But he had never had any real examples of men escaping out of the country unscathed. His new friends suddenly became much more interesting to Andy than simply as musical contacts.

“Bryce’s family is from Canada,” Kris said through a mouthful of pizza.

“Good old, pacifist, not-puttin’-one-fuckin’-toe-into-this-war Canada,” Bryce clarified. Not only was his home country against America’s involvement in Vietnam, Andy recalled, but they opposed the draft as well. So long as Bryce kept his Canadian citizenship while studying in New York, he’d never see even one minute of combat. And, from their explanation, he had the same plan for Jason. “Once we graduate this spring, we’ll head up to Vancouver, stay with my parents for a while. I hear there’s even a music scene building up downtown, real folk kind of vibe. We’ll just work on our music there; ride it out so we can get back to New York. The war can’t last forever, right?”

Prudently Andy kept clear of the snide comments his mind wanted to make; for him and Neal, the war was already lasting far too long, already doing its damage. “Won’t you miss it, though?” he asked Jason instead; even with just a few months’ separation from Alexis, the two days he already spent reunited with his sister felt like a gift. For Jason, the time in between visits could be indefinite, and interminable. “Your friends...your family?”

Bryce’s arm around Jason’s shoulders softened, from the playful headlock to a more intimate touch. Subtly Jason leaned into it, his mouth curving into a wide smile. The Afro-headed man at the counter, had he chosen to look, would simply have noticed a genial gesture among friends, remarked nothing out of the ordinary in that West Village pizzeria. But Andy, knowing the nuances of that kind of touch, so personal it sent shivers of memory through his body, saw something deeper.

“Bryce is...pretty much family these days,” Jason replied, with pure sincerity in his voice. He raised a hand to his shoulder to cover the one already laid there by Bryce, who muttered “dork” under his breath despite the pinkish blush on his cheeks. “He wants me in Canada, I’ll go to Canada.”

Moving his face closer to the shell of Jason’s ear, Bryce muttered still, but with a different inflection from before. “That’s not fair, I want you everywhere,” he grinned, and this time it was Jason’s turn to blush.

Unfazed by the display of affection, Kris rolled his eyes and rested his chin on crossed arms against the table. “See? What did I tell you,” he said to Andy, with the resentment of a young man already fed up with love. “ _Weird_.”

Andy looked at the pair with quite different eyes than Kris, reviewing the past afternoon in his head, seeing it now through a new lens. He hadn’t an inkling all day that Jason and Bryce were together; he hadn’t thought for more than a moment that other men were together in the ways that he and Neal shared. Even worse than the slurs and disgust running rampant in Oklahoma and the rest of the country was the silence: it simply didn’t exist, not in Tulsa, not in anyone’s personal close-knit hometown. But here, in a pizza shop on MacDougal Street, surrounded by a city full of disaffected New Yorkers, Andy found a man with his arm around another, looking into each other’s eyes with a quiet reverence, and smiling.

He couldn’t keep the smile off his face, twitching into existence like a flickering fluorescent light; he tried to keep his attentions on other things, watching the passers-by in the dwindling sunlight, tearing his greasy napkin to shreds on his plate, but his eyes kept going back to Jason and Bryce, so natural in their closeness, so unashamed.

It made him wish more than ever that Neal were there, to share in this small epiphany.

***

With a quick stop at the apartment to pick up Alexis--who became irritated with Kris once she found out he not only got her kid brother high, but he hadn’t shared--they returned to the West Village to the Bitter End, a music bar with a much deeper pedigree than the Flytrap. Andy couldn’t decipher the difference between the two besides location: he found the same overpriced drinks, the same wooden tables covered with a varnish of years of spilled alcohol. The lighting was even worse than the bars back in Tulsa, he criticized, and he wondered how Alexis would ever find photographic inspiration when they couldn’t even see the band onstage.

But the moment the house lights dropped into darkness and a man armed with an acoustic guitar stepped onto the stage, Andy knew his comparisons were over. Bryce and Jason had been vague on the details of the concert that night, saying only that it was a fellow countryman of Bryce’s and that the bouncer of the Bitter End owed them a favor. Andy hadn’t realized how big of a favor the pair had cashed in until Neil Young took to the stage, smiling down genially at their table as he reached his barstool and began to play.

Now Andy could easily tell the difference between this and any other dive venue from here to Oklahoma: it wasn’t the furniture or the drinks that made the Bitter End, it was the atmosphere. From the first chord to come out of Young’s guitar it was clear that the venue was made by its people, its music: electric excitement filled the air as the rest of the band chimed in for Cinnamon Girl, not everyone knowing the words but enjoying it all the same. Andy watched the seasoned musician command the stage, his music a light, meandering folk that Neal would have probably overlooked, but kept the entire bar at the edge of their seats. Up until the very last note no one dared to look away, each song as engaging as a story, an epic tale.

It was so different from the Who concert Andy experienced only last year, watching the spectacle from the far distance of an arena’s bleachers; this was up-close and personal, Young interacting with the audience, taking requests, laughing along with his audience. He had told Neal that was what he wanted for them, a stadium full of fans, everyone’s energy feeding off one another in a once in a lifetime experience. He wanted the world to know Neal’s music, to love it as Andy did, feel the pulsing beat in their bones as they roared through a concert.

But he also found himself drawn to this, the intimacy of a dive bar venue, slipping in among the crowd and through the magic of the music becoming one of them. He could picture Neal and himself on that stage--not that particular one, not even Andy had the ego to fantasize about sharing the stage with Neil Young--getting personal with their audience, sharing laughs and shots of liquor as they played well into the night. It wasn’t better than an arena, and it wasn’t worse; it was simply another option for them, laid open and visible to Andy as Young and his band wrapped up their set.

The music was still humming in his bones as he walked with Alexis and Kris back to the Little Italy apartment, up the stairs and onto a lumpy futon mattress. Kris retired early, declaring that his days as a tour guide were officially over, and the two siblings were left to themselves to catch up on the events of the day. Alexis brewed a pot of tea as Andy spoke animatedly about his New York visit, the city’s people and events having far more of an effect on him than its buildings and parks. And he talked about his newfound friends, how Jason and Bryce had taught him more about the music scene in one afternoon than he had learned in an entire year living in Tulsa.

“Yeah, if you remember it at all tomorrow morning,” Alexis joked, reaching over and ruffling Andy’s spiky hair into a softer, more manageable style.

“I watched them write songs tonight,” he said, his excitement bubbling within him like a child home from their first day of school. “It was automatic between them...seamless. Never saw anything like it before.”

Alexis’s smile brightened. “I have.” She threw up her hands when Andy looked at her expectantly, waiting for the answer, as if it weren’t obvious. “You, nerd,” she poked her brother in the ribs, both siblings grinning. “You and Neal. You’re like, connected by the brain stem when you’re writing music. So attuned to each other it’s freaky sometimes.”

Andy smiled but kept silent, his eyes darting away from Alexis; he had seen more of himself in Bryce and Jason than just their songwriting habits. He hadn’t known what to give away, what to reveal, even to his sister; it was only until late in the night, when his eyes were mere exhausted slits that he spoke up, his voice small from tiredness, and something else.

“Did you know about Jason and Bryce?” he asked. “That they’re...” he searched his brain for the right word, the terms initially coming out at him too blunt, too scary to explain should Alexis press further. She noticed her brother’s hesitation but said nothing, only allowing a hint of a smile to cross her face. “...together.”

“Yeah,” she said, nodding, remembering when she first met them, and thinking they were such an old married couple Neil Simon could have a field day with them. “For a few years, now, I think.” She watched as Andy carefully chose his words, his exhaustion from the day leaving him open, his defenses down. “They’re cute together; good for each other.”

“Never met any guys so open about it.” The weight of his head propped up on his elbow was getting to be too much for his body; Andy plopped down on the futon mattress, staring up at the ceiling, his mind miles away. “No games, no worries about it; they were just... _them_.”

“Well, it _is_ New York, Andy.” She ran her fingers through his hair again, and noticed the depth of thoughtfulness in the eyes that they shared. It wasn’t just his height that made Alexis realize her kid brother was growing up.

Andy continued as if he hadn’t heard her; he wasn’t even sure if the words were _for_ Alexis anymore, or if they were for himself, having to hear it in his own voice, or meant for the wind, to scatter the words and send them half a world away. “They know they’re gay, and it’s okay,” he said, voice barely above a murmur. “Hell, they think it’s great. Probably want to throw themselves a parade over it.”

“Now you’re talking crazy,” Alexis laughed. She got up off the futon and headed towards her bedroom; Andy wasn’t the only one who had a full day, and her professors were never particularly pleased with napping students. “You should get some rest. Can’t have you sleeping through the day here; you can do that back home.”

“It just must be nice,” he said. “To know what you want.” His eyes finally drifted closed, blind to the shadow his sister’s frame cast as she stood in the hallway, confirming for her what she thought she’d known for a long time. “To know who you are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It seems no matter what fandom or alternate universe I'm writing, I'll always find a way to include New York City somehow. <3
> 
> I tried to keep all the New York locations accurate to both the timeframe and the story, from La Guardia airport to Alexis's apartment in Little Italy. Andy and Kris actually stop at the [New York Life Building](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Life_Building) on Park Avenue (so, see, Kris WAS right that it's an important NYC landmark! ;P) They later eat pizza at [Ben's Pizzeria](http://www.yelp.com/biz/bens-pizzeria-new-york) on MacDougal Street. [The Bitter End](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bitter_End) was and still is a legendary music club in the West Village, where, in 1969, Neil Young really did perform with his band Crazy Horse (though it was in February and not in April--my bad!)
> 
> Jason (Wade) and Bryce (Soderberg) are band members of the band [Lifehouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifehouse_\(band\)), if you are not aware. After seeing them in concert (with Kris Allen as their opening act), my beta dreamerren and I decided we had to include them into the 1960s AU. They had no direct connection to the main characters of the story, but we didn't think much of it. It wasn't until a month later that Bryce befriended Neal in real life, shared Thanksgiving dinner with him and Neal's girlfriend Kira, and formed a band together named 2nd Wheel. Bryce is now close with both Neal and Andy, and _it freaks dreamerren and I out SO. MUCH._ :-P


	19. Chapter 19

Andy spent the rest of the week experiencing a comfortable mix of what he wanted to see in New York and what his parents expected from a touring teenager. He spent his days getting lost in the grid of the crowded city, searching out landmarks and photo opportunities, at times with Alexis as a guide. She took him to Central Park, the endless promenades and manmade lakes so large they would swallow downtown Tulsa whole. And one grey, mist-covered morning they rode the subway down to the dilapidated Coney Island, the eerily grinning logo of Steeplechase Park flaking off an abandoned building years after the park closed, just for Andy to dip his toes in the murky waters of the Atlantic.

But his nights numbered behind the closed doors of nightclubs and dive bars, sneaking in under the knowing winks of bouncers after Jason, Bryce and Kris called in favors, looking the other way at his age. Surrounded by the hazy, blue cigarette smoke hanging like a stale net in every venue, Andy watched with eager eyes, taking in every moment of each concert, however large or small. Although none of the acts compared to his first night at the Bitter End, he enjoyed them all, sympathizing with a musician’s rise, noting with the deftness of their experience how hard and how long it took for most to reach the top. He would stay far past the last call, talking with each act, learning about the sweat and blood they spilled that formed the path to the New York City stage. That week Andy lingered by stage door entrances so often Kris started jokingly calling him “groupie.”

Any waking moment he didn’t find himself wandering through Manhattan or holed up inside a nightclub Andy spent with music--playing, writing, listening to others create. Jason and Bryce readily opened their doors to him, some of their jam sessions bearing fruit while others did not, with Andy borrowing one of their guitars when the inspiration struck him just right. He even began the awkward, foreign process of writing songs by himself, but feeling awkward without Neal at his side charting the melody, or Neal in his letters reviewing each other’s drafts. He finished the verse of an entire song in one afternoon, Jason’s guitar fitting oddly into his arms, the others watching like an infant taking his first steps, stumbling on unbalanced legs, always on the edge of falling.

  

_I’ll be right here waiting for you_  
 _To take the place of the fear in you_  
 _I’ll be right here when you’re through..._  


  

Bryce gave out a low whistle when Andy was finished, the apartment silent but for the hum of the icebox. “Sounds like a hit,” he said.

“Not fair,” Kris rested his chin in the curve of his guitar. “I gotta actually go to _college_ to write like that.”

“Light, melodic...you’re perfect for folk,” Jason gave him the most constructive commentary, the musician in the room with the most experience with writing light, melodic folk songs. “Now gimme back my guitar.”

Andy was spending the rest of the session wondering how he would incorporate a powerful, electric guitar track into his new song.

Those non-waking moments of the week--which were few and far-between, Alexis made good on her threat to kick him off the futon every morning--were filled with other thoughts, the ones he tried to push away with sightseeing and sound. Hanging with Bryce and Jason all week left a bittersweet taste in Andy’s mouth, the memory of how Neal tasted there still fresh on his lips. He often drifted into fantasies, imagining Neal the unlikely tourist, maintaining a stoic pose while Andy manically tackled him onto the Coney Island beach. Or he’d fill an empty seat at a nightclub with thoughts of his best friend, nursing a pint, experiencing the music just the same as Andy. He thought of how the futon mattress wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable and thin if Neal’s body were laying on it beside him.

He had no idea where to place these in his mind with all the new information he absorbed--when he never had to consider it before; not in 1968 when all he knew of the world was Tulsa, and what Neal wrote about Vietnam in his letters. But now it was 1969, and there was New York City, where Frank Zappa dropped acid live on the stage of the Fillmore, and his sister wore water moccasins and pierced her nose, and two men could live as lovers and no one would bat an eye.

It wasn’t until his penultimate night in the city that Andy even knew where to begin.

To thank Alexis for letting him stay for the week, he planned to treat her to one of the fancy Italian restaurants along Mulberry Street she had been crowing about; a real expensive meal, so long as the establishments still took dishwashing as payment. Alexis, however, had a different kind of celebration in mind.

“God, what are you, Mom and Dad?” she laughed, rolling her eyes. If it were any typical Tuesday night and she was too exhausted from classes to cook for herself, she’d take the offer up gladly. But, as she explained to Andy, this was Saturday night in New York, and they weren’t going to spend it in a stuffy restaurant with Frank Sinatra piping through the stereo. “We’re going out tonight.”

“To do what?” There weren’t any concerts of particular note that night, Andy had checked and double-checked--not that it had stopped him any time that week, slipping into even amateur open-mic nights at Max’s Kansas City to hear a willowy, androgynous girl croon to her equally ambiguous boyfriend. Andy’s concept of a night out stretched only as far as the stage, needing nothing more than friends, a soft ballad and a beer to enjoy his evening.

Alexis’s answer seemed deliberately evasive, as if the whole truth would send Andy packing straight on a bus back to Tulsa. “ _Out,_ ” she said simply, threading in an earring. She later told him, while they, along with Kris, took the walk from Little Italy over to Sheridan Square, that a friend of theirs was hosting a party at a club in the neighborhood. When he asked what was the occasion--especially one that prompted Alexis to put on makeup and Kris to wear a clean shirt--he only got a shrug and the glib response that it was Saturday.

When they reached the square--which Andy soon quipped that it was a triangle, and not a very impressive one at that--he realized why his sister hadn’t told him any of the details beforehand. A mass of people, young and old, congregated around the entrance to one of the clubs lining the street, spilling out onto the sidewalk, the club’s walls too small to hold them all in. Loud psychedelic music burst out of the door, the tinny, canned sound immediately giving away there was no live music to be found within. The name on the front of the club said it was the Stonewall Inn, but Andy doubted any rooms were available for lodging--or that anyone could sleep with this kind of noise surrounding them.

He wouldn’t have even minded the scene had it been scaled down a click, or thirty: the music was energizing and familiar, Zeppelin always a welcome choice, but the speaker system distorted the songs, making them sound haunting and incomprehensible. Andy was no wallflower and he could dance so long as he had enough liquor in him and no one else was watching, but the crowd of people all moving together, like ants within a colony, left him unsettled. He did have to give his appreciation for the packed club, however, when he was waved into the building by a bouncer without even having to use his half-baked excuse for why he didn’t have ID.

As much as the Stonewall didn’t seem like Andy’s first choice for a Saturday night outing, it was even less obvious for Alexis and Kris. He turned to his sister once all three managed their way inside, displeased at having to shout over the din. “Not really like the Bitter End,” he commented. Alexis shrugged again, her feet already moving to the music, and stressed again that their attendance was to support a friend.

“So relax,” she said, slinging an arm around Andy’s shoulders. “You can last one night without live music!”

Andy snickered, and joked that any sister of his who believed that didn’t know him all too well; but his low, deadpan baritone didn’t carry to Alexis’s ears, and soon she was undauntedly announcing to him and Kris that she was off to the bar for the first round.

Only a few steps brought her out of earshot of Andy, and she felt a tug at her elbow--Kris, with an amused smile, thinking himself witty. “Only guy from one of Adam’s parties who’ll ever come home with you,” he joked, nodding towards Andy. Oblivious to the conversation, Andy smiled, giving a weak wave back.

But no one was quicker on their toes with a comeback than a Skib: Alexis gave a winning smile, winking at her roommate. “Does that mean you’re not coming home with me, Kristopher?” Clearly, the clientele of the bar that night was more interested in someone like Kris than someone like Alexis; he opened his mouth to answer but she gave the response for him, and it was certainly not what he would have said. “Guess that all depends on our host.”[>

The smile on Kris’s face faded at the mention; Alexis, looking only to jest, planted a conciliatory kiss on his cheek and made the rest of her way to the bar. He looked back over in Andy’s direction, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain his sudden surly mood, but found the teenager to be missing. Quickly Kris’s eyes scanned the crowd in what little light the club provided, knowing he’d never hear the end of it if he lost him in _this_ type of place. Finally his gaze set upon Andy, who had made his way to a quieter corner of the club; his optimism was dashed, however, when he saw whom Andy was with.

He heaved a deep sigh, his shoulders sagging petulantly. “No, not tonight,” he grumbled to himself, slowly pushing a path into the corner. “Adam, I don’t need this _tonight_.”

***

“The whole thing is bullshit; it’s like we’ve got no rights at all.”

Though his own voice hadn’t traveled to Alexis’s ears, Andy could clearly hear the unfamiliar tone rising above the buzz of the crowd and the music, high and confident, as if it had been trained by experience to drown out everything else. Out of all the things he had seen in the past week, he would have never thought he’d overhear a political discussion in the middle of a crowded bar on a Saturday night.

His ears perked at the argument being made. New York had its fair share of political dissidents and staged protests, even during Andy’s short stay: Tulsa’s brushes with sit-ins, petitions and bra-burnings looked like tea parties compared to these. Jennie would have found a city full of feminists who used debates and legislation instead of megaphones and lighter fluid; Monty would’ve killed for the enthusiasm Andy saw in the New York University chapter of the SDS, asserting their presence on campus every day, without fail. But he found very little opposition outside of Washington Square Park, the rest of the city soaking in silent apathy; the only voice of protest in the nightclubs he frequented were the acts on stage.

Compelled by his own curiosity, Andy found himself inching closer towards the conversation, into a less densely populated corner of the club. Another voice, less confident and clearly more intoxicated, spoke up. “S’not worth it to make waves,” they argued. “You put yourself out there, you start fighting against the system, you’re the one beat. Won’t change anything, anyway.”

Andy bristled at the remark: he had heard it too often in the past few months to count. The protests and gatherings with the SDS in Tulsa brought him up close and personal with the vociferous opposition and the apathetic alike. The best of them simply shook their heads and walked away, grumbling about youth being wasted on the young; the worst of them came back at them with chants of blind patriotism, with accusations of Communism and--that one time the Piggly-Wiggly was having a sale--hurling eggs. But the ones that bothered Andy the most were exactly like this, attacking those who really wanted to make a change by telling them nothing ever would.

Hands slowly clenching into fists, Andy had a few choice words on his tongue; but the first, loud voice came through once again, unfazed by his aggressor. “That is the fucked-up thinking that’ll keep us down,” he said. The conviction in his words made Andy smile; someone else who wouldn’t give up just because the masses told him it was impossible. “Did you ever hear Martin Luther King telling his followers to just give up, ‘cause they’re never going to accomplish something? They made the change happen for themselves, and that’s what we have to do for us.”

“Then you get your head bashed in by the cops,” the opponent muttered, polishing off his drink and walking off. He brushed curtly past Andy and made no excuses when he bumped into his shoulder. But with his departure he left a clear path for Andy towards the speaker: tall and towering over the crowd in platform boots, hair dyed jet black and eyes rimmed with kohl, he threw up a middle finger at the retreating back, the fingernail dotted with black polish.

“The fucker doesn’t get it,” he said to himself, shaking his head. “They’re going to do it whether we fight or not.” A quick glance to his side, however, and he noticed he was no longer talking simply to himself.

Andy jumped into the conversation immediately, wondering just when he started to feel so comfortable discussing political matters with strangers. “There’s a lot of people who think like him,” he began; the music, this time a bass-driven Motown song, kicked in again, and he found himself shouting to be heard. “There’s no changing what’s set in stone, so why even try. I tell them myself, but they never get it...”

“...If no one ever tried, nothing would get done,” the other man finished the thought, nodding, a smile on his face. Blue-gray eyes seemed to light up at the conversation, a kindred mind within a club full of partygoers with only leisure in their heads. “Good to see some young blood involved in the movement.” Andy gave him a perplexed look: he couldn’t have been any older than Jason or Bryce, though now that Andy had a closer look, he could see the makeup caked on the other man’s face, hiding self-conscious acne scars left over from adolescence. He quickly clarified, dismissing the misspoken statement with a wave of a fingerless-gloved hand. “Not that I’m old, mind you; never revealing your age, and all that.” The furrow in Andy’s brow deepened; he swore that old line was about a lady. “But you’re just a babe.”

Admittedly, Andy was one of the younger members of the SDS, the Tulsa branch mostly made up of university students, but he thought he made up for it in spirit. Besides, he remembered his sister’s doting the past week; he wasn’t that young anymore, after all. “Just working on petitions, handing out flyers,” he shrugged. “Nothing anybody couldn’t do. But I sure could get a lot more done here than back home.”

“Where’s home?” Andy told him Tulsa--where his guitar still waited for him, he thought to himself; where there was a bed in his parents’ home with his name on it and where a soldier would return to him in a few months’ time. The other man smiled, scrutinizing him again with narrowed eyes and a slow, calculating nod of his head. “You know, I know a girl from Tulsa,” he said.

Before Andy could speak again, he was onto a new topic, a deep breath, his weight shifting comfortably onto what Andy thought would be very uncomfortable boots, as if he were planning to stay for a while. “Didn’t think there was much activity in the movement out there. But it affects all of us, I guess; New York, California...Tulsa.” He dropped a hand on Andy’s shoulder, the volume of the crowd making it near impossible to hear without being on top of one another. “Must be especially tough out there, though.”

He thought of the looks of disapproval and confusion from his friends when he suggested they join the SDS, show some solidarity for Bryan and Neal by fighting to bring them home. One way or the other--finding excuses to dodge the draft or ignoring any of Andy’s protest work--they weren’t willing to try and end this war. “You’ve just got to think of what you’re doing this for.” And his thoughts trailed to more pleasant paths, knowing that his efforts could bring Neal--and a lot of other soldiers just like him--home. A soft smile played on Andy’s lips, one he didn’t even know was there until he felt it in his cheeks, his dimples at full blast. “I’ve got this friend--best friend. Just really trying to make sure he gets home from Vietnam.”

But then the hand dropped from his shoulder, and Andy’s new conversationalist was the one with the confused stare. “Wait,” he asked, the expression on his face wondering just what kind of movement this kid was talking about. “How’s fighting for gay rights going to help some guy in the war??”

“Wait, what...” Andy shook his head. “I don’t--”

“So,” a familiar voice suddenly broke out from the din, breaching the cloud of confusion circling around Andy’s head. Kris emerged from the crowd, arms crossed in front of his chest. “I see you’ve met our host.”

Andy turned to the man he had just been talking to, realizing neither of them gave any introductions. “Oh! So you’re--”

“--Adam Lambert,” he held out a hand towards Andy for a handshake. “Party planner, actor, entertainer...” He leaned in a little closer as Andy returned the handshake, close enough to see the glitter on his face shine in the strobe of a blacklight. “Whatever you want me to be.” Adam seemed to linger there a moment, his hand slipping from Andy’s, fingerpads trailing along Andy’s palm, rather than simply letting go. But before Andy could even assess the moment it was gone, Adam straightening up to his full height, his blue-gray eyes wide, hand dramatically draped across his brow like Scarlett O’Hara. “I can’t believe I didn’t introduce myself earlier! My manners just go out the door with a few drinks.”

“I don’t even have that excuse,” Andy said, shrugging.

Just on cue, Alexis returned from her sojourn, her hands full with glasses of foamy, light-colored liquid; when she noticed Adam now among their fold, she squealed and almost dropped all three drinks in an attempt to embrace him. “I see you’ve met my kid brother,” she said, passing Andy a beer and laughing at the snide smile he hid behind the glass.

“ _Seventeen-year-old_ kid brother,” he clarified, wondering when his sweet sister was finally going to get over accentuating his age.

Adam laughed, never taking his eyes off of Andy as he wrapped an arm around Alexis’s waist, accepting a kiss on the cheek for hello and giving one in return. “See? Told you I knew a girl from Tulsa,” he winked; then he stood up straight, pointing a finger at Andy, a connection suddenly made in his brain. “Wait, is this the brother?” he addressed Alexis.

She rolled her eyes; it was clear the dry Skib wit ran in the family. “Only got one of ‘em.”

A grin broke out over Adam’s face, his eyes growing excited and wide. “I do know you,” he said, his entire demeanor changing, opening up past a veil of well put-on self confidence. “You’re the musician! Alexis showed me your concert photos.”

Andy swallowed hard, the strange taste in his throat not just from the watered-down beer in his hand. “You...showed the photos?” he asked his sister. She had every right, of course, the pictures from the Flytrap show both visually stunning and technically masterful, and she was in New York, above all, for photography. But there was still a tiny part of Andy that claimed possession to those photos, his creativity and talent laid bare in silent images, his and Neal’s. He thought of the day after in the darkroom, when they had pored over the prints Alexis made, Neal holding him close, his breath hot against the back of Andy’s neck. Someone else sharing that moment made him twitch.

“They’re only, like, half of her portfolio,” Adam answered. His bravado eroded away in exchange for sincerity, an expression worn far more easily now that he remembered Andy’s passion for music. “They’re really good; they show you’ve got a lot of love for what you do. You should be proud, both of you.” The anxiety building in Andy’s bones waned as he took another swallow of beer; he was being irrational about it, laying claim to photos that only held his image, not his memories. Besides, he thought, it wasn’t easy to resent someone who was complimenting your talent, sight unseen.

But the calm did not last long; Andy’s face puckered as the beer went down his throat, an acrid, spoiled taste filling his senses. “Lex, what _is_ this beer?” he said, resisting the urge not to retch.

Kris, who had been silent but for the scowl on his face, nodded in agreement. “I think someone put out a cigarette in mine,” he frowned, holding it up to his face in the dim light in an attempt to find a butt floating in the embers.

“It’s what they gave me,” she defended; Andy noted to himself, however, that she had yet to take a drink of her own glass. “You try getting the bartender’s attention in a club like this, wearing a skirt.”

Adam raised his eyebrows. “Oh, honey, I have.” Gingerly he picked up her glass and gave it a sniff; he came back up with a grimace, his nose highly offended. “But that isn’t fit for human consumption. They’re not supposed to be serving piss beer tonight; not at my party.” He took the drinks from Alexis and Kris’s hands, affronted; this was no longer just about the beer, it was his reputation on the line. “Let me get you new drinks, on me.”

“In that case, make mine a martini,” Alexis called out as Adam made his way through the crowd.

“Only if you’re puttin’ out!” he shouted back, flashing a grin, before he was swallowed by the throng of people, leaving little more than a trail of glitter in his wake.

Kris tried not to roll his eyes but failed; if he was trying to show restraint tonight, Andy thought, he was doing a piss-poor job of it so far. “Pretty sure he wouldn’t be interested, even if you were putting out,” Kris commented; his arms, now that they were empty once again, crossed against his chest, standing like a surly, stubborn child within the revelry.

“What do you mean?” Andy said, trying hard to push out of his mind the concept of his big sister putting out.

Alexis gave a devious smile that told her brother she knew more than she was letting on. “Let’s just say you get that kind of feeling,” she teased, putting an encouraging arm around Kris’s shoulders. “When a man walks out of your bathroom in the morning, and he didn’t spend the night in your bed.”

“That was _one time_ ,” Kris protested, which only made Alexis giggle smugly.

Andy’s eyes widened with incredulity: while Kris had kept rather silent by omission about his sexuality, Andy wasn’t dense, though he was sure Jason and Bryce would beg to differ. On the subway ride back from Coney Island to her apartment, Andy asked Alexis if it ever felt odd with a man as a roommate, if--according to what he had learned from television sitcoms--it ever led to non-platonic emotions. It sent Alexis into such a powerful and hysterical laugh that she had to grip onto the subway car’s metal pole for support.

“So, you--” he pointed to Kris, whose face was already red from embarrassment and remorse, “And him--”

“They’re an on-again, off-again, thing,” Alexis explained, giving Kris the opportunity to deepen his pronounced pout. “Right now, it’s off-again.” Kris stared at the floor while Alexis provided the information, grumbling unhappily to himself about some weakness for Southern accents.

Shaking his head as he watched his sister try to bolster Kris’s spirits with a pep talk, Andy couldn’t fathom the world of sexual indiscrimination his friends in New York lived in, the _looseness_ of it all. In no terms was he conservative in these matters--he was pretty sure the things he and Neal did in the back of the Charger were illegal in most states--but his mind still resided in the idyllic lands of the Midwest, where teenagers went steady and high school sweethearts like his parents got married, had children of their own, and the cycle began anew. He already knew he was breaking that chain; now he saw that his sister was as well, in a different way. He sympathized with Kris, who clearly hid his hurt underneath a thin veneer of resentment, but at the same time couldn’t understand the “freedom” in sexual freedom. Sleeping around just seemed to make people miserable.

He would learn, soon enough, that, particularly with Adam and Kris, things were more complicated than he perceived.

Quicker than anticipated, Adam returned to their small group, still holding onto the inferior drinks he took from Alexis and Kris. “Forgot yours,” he said to Andy, and then held up his hands. “And I’m all full. Walk with me to the bar?”

Only two steps away from Alexis and Kris, and Andy quickly learned this walk to the bar was no easy feat: with more bodies packed in than Andy had almost ever seen in one place, it looked like the Stonewall was trying to set a record for just how badly they could break their fire code. He and Adam had to maneuver through the crowd to a location less than fifty yards away, but it took longer than Andy anticipated. Making sure not to spill the rancid beer on himself or others, he inched his way past men dancing together--and others doing far different things from dancing--trying to follow the path Adam cut before them.

But following Adam wasn’t easy, either. Adam commanded the floor like a dramatic sovereign with his subjects, stopping nearly every five seconds to chat with one of his guests, every man on the floor his best and oldest friend. Some were stealing glances in Andy’s direction as well, but for most of the journey he kept his eyes on the ground, watching where his feet stepped on the dance floor and wondering how Adam was so effortlessly moving through the crowd in those platform boots.

Had his eyes not been trained on the floor, Andy wouldn’t have noticed those boots stop short in front of him, turning around abruptly, and it probably would have ended with an unfortunate collision and drenching of the both of them.

“So...it’s Andy, right?” Adam engaged him, and Andy, startled, could do little more than let his eyes go wide and alert, and dumbly nod. “Look, just wanted to say that I meant what I told Lexie back there.” That sincere look was back in his eyes again, Andy noticed; it had disappeared at the first stop, a lithe man with a shocking pink wig spinning on the dance floor who complimented Adam’s shirt, but at the mention of music it returned. “Those photos show you’ve got to have real passion. How long have you been playing music?”

Andy couldn’t help himself from smiling when he started talking; no matter where in the world--a garage studio in Tulsa, an army base in Vietnam, a gay bar in New York--music time and time again brought strangers together. “Guitar? A few years,” he said, remembering how he begged his parents to let him try the instrument, how he held his first Gibson like it was a newborn child. “Piano, probably ever since I could sit up. But that was our first show,” he beamed.

Adam nodded slowly, taking into close consideration the “our” Andy used instead of “my.” He was a singer, too, he said, though he admitted he never had a head for instruments. “This is all I need,” he said, pointing to his mouth, careful not to actually spill any of the beer into the mouth in question. “Though, sometimes, it’s not enough.”

His voice changed tone: Andy still didn’t have to strain to hear him, but there was a definite shift, no longer as confident, no longer commanding everyone’s attention. He told Andy how he moved from California to New York, seeking out the bright lights of Broadway, hoping with only his voice and a prayer he could become a star. But he found it was easier said than done, and he had been making a living singing at the odd nightclub, and making contacts by organizing parties like the one they stood in the midst of at that moment. As Andy had heard from Jason and Bryce, and an endless string of musicians paying their dues in the dive bars of the Village, it was a long, hard road to the top.

They talked about music until they reached their destination, Adam masterfully guiding through the crowd even while walking backwards, facing Andy, and ticking off his five favorite Rolling Stones songs. Andy hadn’t even realized they reached the bar until Adam took the glass of beer from his hands--and could have only done so, Andy reasoned, had he put the other two drinks down. After giving a few choice words to the bartender--at one point Andy overheard him threaten to put one of those platform boots where the sun don’t shine--the inferior drinks were replaced with unopened bottles of Coors, damp with perspiration and cold to the touch. Andy was more than satisfied, but Adam held back, making sure that the spoiled drinks were spilled out into the sink and not simply recycled for the next unlucky customer.

“Gotta keep my reputation,” Adam explained, resting his elbows on the bar and leaning back. “If people start hearing the Stonewall mistreated their patrons on my watch, no one’ll hire me for this again. And that would mean a lot of fundraising lost for the cause.”

The blank stare Adam received in turn reminded him that their previous conversation may not have been quite on the level. “Ah, I forgot,” he smiled. “What we had here, young Andy Skib, was a failure to communicate.” He cocked his head to the side again, scrutinizing Andy through narrowed blue eyes; Adam always felt like he could read people, tell their life stories from just a glance. “I’m guessing you run with the anti-war crowds. War Resisters League? CCCO?”

Andy had heard mumbles and whispers about these other resistance groups but never met anyone from them; Tulsa was a small city as it was, with even fewer people looking to take a stand against the war. “SDS,” he replied, and Adam’s face took on a level of seriousness Andy wouldn’t have thought possible, certainly not in the middle of a dance club.

“You watch yourself with them,” he warned, shaking a finger in Andy’s direction. “I don’t know how they act back home, but here, some SDS splinter groups are fucking crazy. Don’t get involved in that shit.”

The expression on Andy’s face soured as Adam turned back to the bartender, ordering himself a tequila. Everyone seemed to treat him like a kid; especially in New York, where he had met and made wonderful friends, but was still considered Alexis Skib’s baby brother. In a few months’ time, he thought grimly, he could be shipped off to war; if Uncle Sam thought he was damn old enough, the rest of the world should, too. “I do just fine, thanks,” he said curtly; Adam, watching the bartender to make sure he used the top shelf liquor, hadn’t noticed. “So you’re not with the movement, then? Are you for the war?”

Adam looked about ready to spit out his first taste of the drink in surprise, had it not been an extremely expensive mouthful of tequila. “Fuck, no,” he exclaimed. “It’s baseless, horrible bullshit. I wouldn’t let them draft me, kicking and screaming. You’re doing a mitzvah trying to end it.”

“Did you burn your draft card?” Andy asked, ignoring the term Adam threw out that he didn’t understand--he assumed it was some new, metropolitan term they were using in New York.

A broad, indulgent smile crossed Adam’s face. “Oh, I went to the draft board,” he said, a hand on his hip. “I went in a full-length bubblegum pink cocktail gown, four-inch stilettos, and more mascara than Twiggy.” He snapped his fingers as he raised the glass of tequila to his lips once more. “Gave me a 4-F faster than I could cross my legs.”

Andy’s eyes widened; he had heard a fair share of tales on evading induction--stories, Nick had called them, everyone just needed a good story--but never heard one quite like this. The mark of such a 4-F classification wasn’t a proud one: being found unfit to serve due to sexuality was a blemish on a record that never faded away, and affected every decision made down the line--colleges, employers, even landlords wouldn’t touch a 4-F.

Yet here was Adam, boasting about it in the middle of a crowded bar, a smile stretched across his face. He wore the 4-F like a mark of distinction rather than a blight, a confirmation by the United States government of what he had known about himself since middle school. Adam Lambert was the kind of man who, if a door was closed to him, he fought and spit until that door was burst wide open. It was inspiring, Andy thought, if not a little intimidating. And also if the story hadn’t involved wearing heels.

“It’s something I feel very strongly about,” Adam explained, after seeing the shocked expression in Andy’s eyes. “And I don’t mean the dress.” He said that he was a protester, too, just like Andy, but unlike the SDS, he was fighting for a different kind of freedom. “I’m with the GLF--” which, once again, was received by a blank stare from Adam’s one-man audience. He elaborated. “The Gay Liberation Front. Working towards equal rights, social legitimacy...” He took a deep breath, a wistful, faraway look in his eyes, as if he were gazing into a distant, yet attainable, future. “Fuck, I’d just like to walk down the street without worrying I’m heading to a beating.”

A deep, unsettled lump formed in Andy’s throat; he tried to wash it away with a mouthful of beer, but to no avail. It also couldn’t wash away the image conjured in his mind, the memory of Jason holding Bryce’s hand in the pizzeria and Bryce whispering into his ear, and then imagining a hateful mob--or even the police themselves--bringing that to an end. He shuddered instinctively, a foreboding chill running down his spine, a reaction that Adam couldn’t help but notice.

“They don’t...actually do that here, do they?” Andy asked in a wavering voice. He repeated the words his sister had been using ever since she moved to the city, describing how her new home was a beacon of freedom, of liberal mindframes and, most of all, love. “But...it’s _New York_.”

Adam shook his head slowly, intrigued by the naivete he saw in this teenager’s eyes, written all over his face. “Oh, babe,” he said, flagging down the bartender for another tequila, this time for Andy. This would be a long night. “You’ve got a lot to learn.”

***

They returned to the corner of the club where they had left Alexis and Kris, an armful of fresh drinks in tow, but the rest of their select party was nowhere to be found. Kris had wandered during Adam and Andy’s absence and connected with some friends from school; Alexis had finally found someone to buy her the martini she had craved.

“More for us, then,” Adam concluded, reaching over to pluck one of the bottles from Andy’s grasp.

Although surprised at their departure, Andy was eager to discuss Adam’s own brand of protest, particularly without interjections from his sister. They were both fighting forces that seemed too powerful, the odds too insurmountable--Andy against the onslaught of a treacherous war and a government forcing its youth into combat; and Adam, fighting against the stigmas of society itself, turning it on its head for a better life for all.

A week ago, Andy had never met an openly gay man in his life; now, he was sitting in a corner of the Stonewall Inn, getting a crash course in the trenches of the gay rights movement, sharing tequila shots with a six-foot tall man in platform boots and thick, black eyeliner.

“It’s more than just the legal shit,” Adam explained, once they found an empty space at the tables lining the club’s walls. It wasn’t as noisy there, Adam had reasoned, and his notoriety would no longer be the cause of their distractions. “Yeah, getting more rights--getting any rights--it’s a big deal, I understand that. But look at me, I’m no fucking lobbyist.” With flourishing hands he indicated his appearance, from the platform boots to his tight, tattered jeans and black nail polish, to the tips of his blue-black dyed hair. It was certainly nothing like Andy had ever seen before, and certainly not in those pamphlets he handed out with the portraits of prim, business-like SDS lobbyists tucked inside.

“So, no _Mr. Lambert Goes To Washington_?” Andy joked, the warm buzz of the drinks simmering in his veins.

Adam laughed in agreement. “I help in other ways,” he said. “It’s about letting others feel comfortable about who they are, living in their own skin. We need a voice on the streets just as much as in the courts. What we need in this world is some love.” He smiled, a spark of optimism in his eye, a fleeting look of hope that Andy hadn’t expected to see in a confident, grounded person like Adam. Faraway dreams of changing the world were more...well, _his_ style. “I want to change this city from just a bunch of gays living together...into a real community.”

It was a lofty ambition, Andy thought, and indeed he told Adam so, with a sage nod and another swallow of his beer. Andy was merely trying to change the will of the government, which was ambitious enough; Adam was trying to change the will of the people as well, and even among the gay people of New York there wasn’t a unanimous consensus. Hell, probably even among the people in the club, not everyone shared Adam’s community vision.

“It’s why I do this,” he said, opening his arms wide, surveying the chaotic party he had orchestrated. The party planning not only gave him the connections necessary to start his career, but helped raise funds for the GLF. In his own way, Adam contributed to the cause, the money going to Washington in his place, and also staying within the city to build support organizations and youth groups. “It’s a small contribution, but I want to do what I can,” he admitted with a smile. “It’s not just about me and my life, or my friends’. It’s about all those kids out there who are alone in this, who don’t know what the fuck to do. I’m trying to make _their_ lives better, too.”

“There’s nothing about this that seems small,” Andy commented, looking around the crowded club.

Adam snickered, not enough of a gentleman to let that one pass. “That’s what he said,” he bit his lip, chuckling when his companion for the evening laughed so hard beer nearly came out of his nose.

Their conversation continued longer than Andy had considered, the topics jumping from activism to music to Andy’s favorite New York attractions, and back again. Though he knew of Jason and Bryce--Adam scoffed that the couple were too into each other to work for gay rights, but there was a tinge of jealousy in his voice--Adam frequented different nightclubs than they did, listing a few he had performed in off the top of his head that Andy never even heard of. He was quickly realizing there was more to see and do in New York than he could hope to experience in a lifetime, much less one week off from high school.

Adam was, in more ways than one, quite different from Jason and Bryce, or even Kris, or any of the openly gay people Andy had met while in town. Where Kris was silent and understated, and Bryce and Jason subtle yet sweet, Adam owned his sexuality like nothing Andy had seen before, wearing platform boots and makeup as comfortably as he wore black jeans and an old vacation t-shirt. He held who he was, what he wanted, right in the palm of his hand, placed it on his chest like a Boy Scouts badge; it wasn’t kept safe within lined sheets of paper, or the confines of a car’s backseat. Or within the wooden walls of a treehouse. Adam showed him, with a flick of his wrist and an exaggerated swing of his hips to the music, that there was a marked distinction between being a man who slept with other men, and being a gay man.

“You know, I still can’t believe you’ve gone to protests already,” Adam said, the party swelling and crowding around them so badly he had to sit nearly on top of Andy, the loud music making them shout into each other’s ears to be heard. “Did you really get a bra thrown on your head?!”

“A _flaming_ bra,” Andy clarified, which sent Adam into a fit of laughs so potent he doubled over, hugging his stomach.

“Man, that is definitely something you don’t see at one of our gatherings.” Carefully Adam wiped the tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes, making sure his mascara did not run. “Staging protests, headlining concerts...you’ve really done a lot for a kid.”

Again Andy soured to the nickname, but after enough beers and tequila shots to lose count, he no longer felt the restraint to keep it to himself. “Fuck, I am going to kill my sister,” he rolled his eyes to the ceiling dramatically. “All of her New York friends have been calling me that. But,” he looked at Adam, hoping his large eyes would be an entreaty to respect and maturity. “I’m not a kid.”

A strange smile crossed Adam’s face, and his voice dropped to a rasp, even lower than Andy’s. “No,” he agreed, his eyes flickering down, roving along Andy’s body even in the dim lights of the club. “You are certainly not.”

With his gaze drifting back upwards, Adam scrutinized Andy’s face again, as if really looking at him for the first time. Then his face broke out into a cheshire grin. “ _Now_ I’m finally seeing it,” he said, like a lightbulb going off above his head.

“What?” Andy asked.

“The Skib resemblance. Don’t know how I didn’t see it before.” Reaching forward, Adam took Andy’s chin into his hand, turning his face towards the light to get a better look. Andy’s eyes widened with the sudden movement, and a hint of green glinted within his deep brown irises. That was what Adam was searching for. “It’s all in the eyes.”

Andy wanted to point out it was an observation many of their friends made over the years, that it was a trait they both lovingly inherited from their mother. He wondered where his sister, speak of the devil, had gotten to in the club, if she had reunited with Kris somewhere on the dance floor. He was about to voice his thoughts aloud when he suddenly felt a gentle pull at his chin, his air supply cut off, and a pair of forceful, determined lips against his.

It was all too sudden and shocking for Andy to react: Adam’s mouth was on a mission, coaxing surprised lips open, claiming Andy’s for his own. Painted fingernails brushed against the skin of his cheeks, teasing at his jaw. Adam’s tongue darted out to trail along Andy’s lips, his teeth; Andy felt the abrasiveness of Adam’s teeth raking against his lips. He certainly wasted no time.

The sting of memories pressed into Andy with the kiss, instant as a gunshot and just as startling. He thought of Neal’s lips, how aggressive they could be when desperate and aching for touch; but also how gentle, the first, sleepy kisses of the morning, a faint brush of his lips before either man fully awoke. He remembered Neal’s hands on him, sometimes rough and forceful, gripping onto muscle, fingers digging into flesh; and sometimes feather-soft, like a hesitant palm against his cheek in a treehouse, moments before their first kiss. It was nothing like this, all those touches and kisses embedded deep in memories, every moment weighing more heavily on his heart than any stolen kiss in a darkened club ever could.

He realized in that moment--Adam crouching in on him in the Stonewall, mouth on his, hand creeping up his knee--what Andy hadn’t known he searched for in his visit to New York. The talk with Adam, the days spent with Jason and Bryce, all led to his conclusion, solid as concrete. Andy knew what he wanted; more than that, he knew who he was. Whom he loved.

With a short gasp he pushed Adam away, still smelling the remnants of tequila on Adam’s breath, tasting it on his own lips. His eyes were wide and his breathing heavy; leaning back, he felt the wall press up against his shoulderblades, warm and buzzing like the room was alive, and he wondered when the hell Adam encroached so deeply into his space.

Andy held his arms out, elbows locked, distancing himself from Adam, but there was no need; Adam would not go where he wasn’t wanted. “Stop,” Andy said, confused at the strain in his own voice, amazed that with the jumble of thoughts parading through his mind he could even make out one word.

Laughing softly, his hand already detaching itself from Andy’s knee, Adam sat up straight, giving Andy the wide berth he desired. His kohl-rimmed eyes seemed to shine in the club’s dim light even more now, as if his initial, flirtatious veneer was rubbed off once Andy pulled away, and all that remained was genuine. “I already have,” he said, his smile friendly and inviting, open to nothing more than the conversation they shared earlier.

When he looked at Andy again, examining him in the way Andy first thought was innocent but now felt quite suspect, there wasn’t any attempt at seduction, no purring double entendres meant to make Andy blush. “I get it,” he conceded, trying to use words to smooth away the startled look in Andy’s eyes, his nerves on alert like a deer in the headlights. He shook his head. “Not gonna push; not like that. Guess I just read the situation wrong.”

Adam chuckled to himself as the defensive hands finally lowered, Andy’s breathing returning to normal, if not the size of his eyes. “But you’ve got to be gay; don’t tell me you’re not. I’m not that off.”

“I...” Andy swallowed hard, still not confident in the words coming out of his mouth, of that particular word that made Adam so flippant and carefree, as easy as it had been to say he was a singer, an entertainer. Andy’s tongue had yet to catch up with his heart.

Instead he said the words that were already there, what he felt he had known all along. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again the nervous waver was gone from his voice. “I have someone,” Andy said, his eyes softening, sincere.

Adam started for a moment, but then a knowing smile stretched across his face. “The soldier...in Vietnam,” he surmised.

An enormous wave of relief washed over Andy as he nodded and smiled; he never knew it would feel good just to admit something, to claim it. “I write to him, send him letters, photos,” he said, feeling a swell in his chest that had nothing to do with the pumping bass of the music. “All the fuckin’ time. And songs.” He grinned, not even bothering to stem the flow of words, rushing out from all the months left inside, unsaid. Not like this. “He writes songs. And...they’re the most amazing songs I’ve ever heard, and I’m not just saying it ‘cause I sing them. And he plays...he doesn’t have a guitar out there but I keep his for him, I keep it safe. He plays like nothing I’ve ever heard before and it’s...it’s so fucking beautiful.”

He wanted to laugh, bolt up onto his feet and out of his skin; he settled for saying it again, not for Adam’s benefit but for his own, to hear it in his own voice and take credit for the past year of his life. “I have someone.”

With the soft laugh of an expert who knew all about first love, Adam pressed a reassuring hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Yeah, I kinda got that impression.” He grew thoughtful for a moment, seeing the earnestness with which Andy spoke, felt the energy nearly jumping through his skin over telling Adam, telling _anyone_. “And from what I’ve seen, he’s a damn lucky guy. Maybe what we’re fighting for...isn’t so different, after all.”

He shook that shoulder, rousing Andy to his feet. “Come on,” he chucked at Andy’s permanent grin, a tell-tale sign to Adam that no amount of complimentary tequila would earn him even a messy make-out session in the corner of the Stonewall. “Let’s go find where your sister’s wandered off to.”

***

Later in the night, after the siblings were reunited and Alexis had one martini too many to walk home in a straight line, Kris called them a taxi to send them back to their apartment. Kris said he would join them later, explaining only that he had something to do before he could leave Sheridan Square. As the taxi peeled out and turned onto Seventh Avenue Andy saw him confronting Adam outside of the Stonewall, accusingly asking him how many more inappropriate people he planned to kiss that evening.

The cab ride was spent mostly in silence, Alexis always a sleepy type of drunk, Andy too wrapped up in the scenery of New York lit up at night--and his own thoughts--to make conversation. He only wrenched his gaze from the window and the passing lights of Houston Street when Alexis poked him in the ribs to gain his attention.

“You have fun tonight?” she asked, and gave a toothy smile when Andy turned to her and nodded. “Good; I’m glad. I worried I shouldn’t bring you...but Kris said you’d dig it.”

She watched her brother from across the backseat of the taxi, her head resting against a propped-up elbow. He answered her but still seemed distant somehow, the polite smile on his face merely a thin line of his lips, and not reaching the eyes whose color matched hers. Andy was listening, surely, but his mind was elsewhere.

Though he said not a word, Andy’s mind was anything but quiet, whirling by faster than the streetlights outside the taxi window. The backseat stayed silent a minute more, a worried decision batting back and forth in his head. When he finally did speak, he sounded smaller than he intended; afraid. A new friend like Adam Lambert was still just a stranger; Alexis was blood.

“Lexie?”

When she looked over again, his eyes were cast down, locked on his hands in his lap. Andy’s lower lip started trembling, but he bit down on it, hard, and that was the end of that. “I...I think I might be gay.”

He wasn’t sure what to expect in response, too scared to even flinch away from the possibilities. Alexis always beamed about how New York was so different, so liberal and free; it was her first entreaty to Andy when he stepped off the plane at LaGuardia. But friends, even a roommate, were quite different from a kid brother. And holy fuck, if she told their _parents_...

But when he hazarded a glance across the backseat, he saw a wide, sympathetic smile on his sister’s face. “Oh, Andy,” Alexis said, shaking her head slowly, her voice soft from her inebriation. “You don’t _think_ you’re gay.”

***

Before he reached the airport the next afternoon, Andy had Alexis direct him to the closest post office, smacking down a fiver onto the clerk’s desk and purchasing enough stamps for a small army. He had meant to send all his mail periodically throughout his visit, but there had been so much to see, so much _life_ to live in New York he forgot to tell others about it. At this rate, the postcards he bought for his parents would show up two days after he arrived back at their door.

Half of the letters in his bulky stack were military-bound, meant only for Neal’s eyes: pages and pages of letters Andy had written about New York, postcards, the songs he had written the hours at Jason and Bryce’s apartment. But one letter stood out from all the rest: the newest, written only hours before in the moments preceding the sunrise, after Andy’s night at the Stonewall Inn that might have changed everything. It was one page, one line of ink, that Andy gave one careful, last look at before slipping it into its envelope, sealing it with his lips, and sending it to its destination halfway around the world.

_I miss you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song lyrics are from the To Have Heroes song [Lost In America](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tohaveheroes2), off of the 2011 EP of the same name.
> 
> Andy mentions going to an open mic night at a club called Max's Kansas City (which sounded appropriate for obvious fandom reasons ;-)). He actually saw a pre-fame [Patti Smith](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patti_smith) perform there with her then-boyfriend, [Robert Mapplethorpe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe).
> 
> If you don't already know, the [Stonewall Inn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Inn) in Greenwich Village is the site of the famous Stonewall Riots and where many consider started the gay rights movement in the United States. But at the time Andy visits the establishment, it's just known as one of the largest gay bars in New York City, prone to poor service and frequent police raids.
> 
> I fudged the details of Adam's social activism a bit: the [Gay Liberation Front](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Liberation_Front) (or GLF) wasn't formed until the summer of 1969--after the riots at the Stonewall Inn.


	20. Chapter 20

They only received mail once per week in the field, if the mail trucks managed to get it to the soldiers in whatever shithole of a base or poor excuse for a military outpost they were stationed. And each week it was like Christmas for the soldiers, poring over letters and gently shaking the packages to determine if it was a tin of mother’s cookies or a carton of American cigarettes. Andy’s letters from New York came in one bulk shipment, handed by a mail clerk to Neal with a large rubber band tied around the package. A hasty mission deployment delayed Neal’s readings even further; with little time to even retrieve his rifle, Neal left the camp, shoving the stack of letters into his pack, hoping no harm would come to them before Andy’s words could reach his eyes.

He only returned to them once the mission was declared a success, Neal’s rifle had cooled down from leaning on the trigger, and there appeared no further immediate threat on the horizon. Snapping the rubber band onto his wrist, he fanned out the letters in his dirty hands, a colorful mix of postcards and envelopes, bright snapshots of a city made of metal and concrete, so far removed from the thatched roof village the unit found themselves in. A shouted order came from their commanding officer--a man in an impeccable officer’s suit who insisted on tagging along--and Neal knew the task without listening, but he did not act just yet. If it were truly important, he reasoned, David or Bryan would come over and snap him back to work.

So many of the letters called out to him--the postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge with a tiny stick-figured Andy drawn onto its length, the thin envelope Neal could clearly see held new sheet music inside--but the top of the stack held the most mystery to him. A simple, plain envelope, no different from every other letter sent to Vietnam; only Neal could tell from just a glance that this was unique. Small and thin, the envelope could have barely held more than a sheet of paper within, a rarity from his best friend, who often filled his envelopes to bursting with everything he could find to say. Neal selected this one first, slitting open the seam with his thumb, his curiosity getting the better of him.

When he read the simple words on the page his throat grew tight with emotion, the world seeming to stop spinning to allow their meaning to sink in.

__

_I miss you._

__

With a stoic face hiding the emotions stirring within him, Neal heard Andy’s voice in his head; whispering the words in his ear as they lay in bed moments before a sunrise, singing them in a loud, confident tone onstage in front of thousands. He had never experienced either in real life--those words never graced the songs Neal wrote, and when in bed with Andy he usually focused on other things--but he heard them all the same, like memories that were meant to be made. Neal couldn’t wait to get home and hear that voice again--and, once he did, there would be no need for Andy to say those words again.

But he couldn’t think of the number of days he had left until that return, with so many obstacles in the way, every minute of those days one glance between life and death. When he held Andy’s letters in his hands any number was too large to bear.

He heard voices again, but this time it wasn’t the memory of Andy’s echoing in his head. The commanding officer barked an order again, more fire in his voice this time, anger over Neal’s laziness. Neal was still not terribly interested in paying attention, until he heard Bryan’s voice ring out clearly from across the tiny village, reiterating the order.

“Get a move on it, Tiemann.” Neal remembered when Bryan Jewett used to call that name before, a continent and a lifetime ago, when they were just good friends swapping stories and songs on the guitar. But now Bryan’s voice was all business, mustering up whatever authority he could gather, making sure Neal knew he addressed him as his superior and not as his friend.

Neal took in a deep sigh, looking over at Bryan’s direction, then back to the letter in his hand. Before anyone came over to see what he was so engrossed in Neal slipped the paper back into its envelope, returning it with the others to his pack. This was not the time, Bryan would warn him, to ignore a direct order--and make his commanding officer look bad in the process--just to read one stupid letter.

Hours later, when he would get back to base and hole himself away in a corner of the barracks to read them all, Neal would have time to reflect on Andy’s letters, on the excitement brimming in his penstrokes, nearly bursting off the page. He’d think about the possibilities of another life, where he’d be right there beside Andy, experiencing New York along with him: the sights, the music, the people. From the way Andy described them, Neal thought he’d have made good friends with Jason and Bryce, if given half the chance.

And the music...he’d have given his right arm to watch Neil Young play, even though he had no patience for folk; just to breathe the same air as a songwriter of his caliber. Neal would be there, watching Andy come into his own musically, step out as the voice of Neal’s words and find words of his own. He’d see Andy on the cusp of maturity, ready to show the world the talent and the man he had only truly shared with Neal.

But Neal had not been in New York, sitting next to his best friend in a stuffy, beautiful nightclub, one hand cradling a beer and the other inching up Andy’s thigh underneath the table. He may never reach it still. Instead he was stuck in a jungle village ninety miles south of Saigon, a rough, dirty patch of land inhabited by women, elderly men and children, whose ancestors farmed and fed from that land for centuries. In America’s, and that commanding officer’s mind, these farmers who cowered away from the soldiers’ machine guns and didn’t speak a word of English, posed an imminent threat to democracy.

“Fuck democracy,” David had muttered to Neal before the mission as they had stood at attention, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the C.O. drone on like the soldiers actually bought his tale. “I just wanna know if they’re a threat to me.”

All the unit found in the straw and mud huts were pickaxes and ploughs; most of the villagers were too weak to even look at a machine gun, let alone wield one. But, a threat they were, and Neal had his orders; they had to be dealt with accordingly.

With Andy’s letters carefully stowed away, Neal pulled out the Zippo lighter from his jacket pocket; a gift from Andy from the first time Neal had been in country, invaluable when the autumn rains soaked through his matches and he ached for smoke in his lungs. Wordlessly he flipped on the lighter’s flame, flickering slightly in the breeze, and held it to a hut’s thatched roof, the dried straw quickly catching and spreading. In moments the whole roof was ablaze, along with the other huts of the village handled by the rest of the grunts in the unit. The sound of the straw crackling and burning nearly drowned out the anguished cries of the villagers forced to watch.

Neal watched for a moment as the fire rained down, the heat from the flames warming his face, beads of sweat dripping into his eyes. He must have stood there too long without noticing; before he knew it a hand was on his shoulder, snapping him out of the trance the dancing flames put him in.

It was David, a look of concern etched into his brow. Of course it was David, Neal thought; after hearing about Yeager’s startling demise, and with every letter David received from home, David stuck to Neal like the old stray dog he cared for last year. Never one to hide his emotions--that, David always half-joked, was Neal’s job--he explained, very simply, that with his world at home slowly crumbling, he couldn’t afford to lose Neal, too. Neal had told him it was a bad idea to put so much faith in the life of just one grunt, but deep inside, he was touched, and rather honored, to gain the distinction.

“We’re mobilizing.” David hiked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating to Neal the other soldiers in their unit, already distancing themselves from the fires and piles of rubble that used to be villagers’ homes.

Before Neal could move along with them, David took a closer inspection of his face, the solid, steeled jaw, the lack of emotion in his eyes. “You okay?” he asked.

Neal didn’t answer right away, and, just as he did when they first became friends over a year ago, David took it as his cue to push for more. “Look, I get it, if you’re not,” he offered. “This shit isn’t easy, for any of us. But if you wanna talk...”

A derisive snort came from his friend, and as Neal reached for the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, he shrugged David’s hand off his shoulder. David was the talker, Neal thought, the one who could charm the fur coat off a grizzly bear in the dead of winter, who had everyone in the unit claiming him as their best friend. Neal kept his emotions to the lyrics of a song, folding them within driving drum beats and guitars, and friend or not, he wasn’t going to let David turn him into a head case.

Unsheathing one of the cigarettes from the pack, Neal wordlessly held its end to the rapidly burning hut, the flames licking at his fingers, threatening to scorch their ink. He held David’s gaze as the tip ignited to a slow, smoldering burn, and he put the cigarette to his lips, a puff of smoke Neal’s only response.

***

“I’m worried about...Dave.”

Neal fumbled on the last word, losing his confidence at the last second, falling back on more comfortable standards. He scratched at the back of his head, standing awkwardly as Bryan eyed him, scrutinizing his statement. Even though Neal anxiously misspoke he’d work with what he gave himself; one conversation about his concern for a fellow soldier, a friend, was just as good as another. Besides, he was inadvertently blocking Bryan’s way out of the barracks, so Bryan could do little more than have this conversation or shove Neal out of the way.

For one brief moment Neal thought he would actually choose the latter; but a solid expression changed to a crease in Bryan’s brow, and he took the bait. “Cook?” he clarified, and when Neal nodded Bryan gave a shrug, as if worrying about David was as futile as fretting about the jungle heat. “Still alive; still got all his limbs last time I heard. What’s there to worry about?”

It wasn’t easy to describe bloodless ills to Bryan; any wound from a bullet hole to shrapnel to a papercut and he could quantify it, get the soldier a medic or send him to the hospital. It wasn’t that Bryan didn’t experience the mental strains of war, Neal just thought he largely ignored them. “Well...” Neal began, finding it difficult to put into words. “He’s...well, he’s happy.”

Bryan snorted out a laugh. “That is worrying,” he said.

“No, I mean...” Neal took a deep breath, suddenly regretting confronting Bryan in the first place. When he and David had arrived in Vietnam back in January, they expected to find the old unit waiting for them, with reliable Bryan at its helm. But the rosters had changed, either through soldiers reaching their ends of tour or reaching darker ends, and the only one still familiar to them was Bryan. Neal had missed a hell of a lot in combat in a month, and the lines on Bryan’s face never let him forget it. “He’s trying to be happy. To keep that up for all of us.”

Ever the optimist, David had been the light of the unit since Neal had known him back in basic, when David latched on with a lopsided grin and declared him his best friend. That personality even withstood the eighteen hour plane flight to Vietnam, David’s ability to bring out the best in his fellow man still shining through after months in a warzone. But now his friend was showing breaks in that sunny disposition, chinks in the armor he used to hold himself, hold all of them, together. Most of the unit couldn’t see it, least of all Bryan, but Neal, who knew by now how to look, noticed the difference with every letter David received from home, every bit of bad news his family delivered. Despite the hell they had been dropped into, David had always seemed to be content; now, he settled for making everyone think he was.

Again Bryan laughed, waving off Neal’s worries with a dismissing hand. There were far more serious things to care about in Vietnam than a grunt who only looks like he’s happy. “Oh, Cook’s not hurting anyone,” he said. Bryan was one of the many soldiers in camp who was taken in by David’s show of positivity, seeing only what skimmed at the surface and not bothering with what lay beneath. Neal, after being dubbed David’s best friend in country, didn’t have the luxury of ignorance. “Everyone’s got their way of coping with this shit, let him cope with it his way.”

Neal bristled; Bryan wasn’t listening at all. David had always been the positive one among a sea of nay-sayers, that fact everyone knew well enough. But now he didn’t have the heart to back up the bravado. Bryan wouldn’t understand that, Neal concluded; though, he thought with a bit of sadness in his eyes, the old Bryan would have.

“It’s not the shit happening here I’m worried about,” he muttered instead.

Reflecting for a moment, Bryan reconsidered, scratching his stubbled chin. For all the shit the drill sergeants gave at basic over a clean face and a crew cut, no one gave a damn about it in-country; you were lucky if you had enough life in you to grow a beard. “He sure does talk a lot lately,” he admitted.

They couldn’t have kept it a secret if they tried: David was a natural talker and always would be, whether the conversation be sweet, sour, or anything in between. But when he found himself nervous or stressed the words poured out of him, even on missions. Neal had jokingly threatened to shove a grenade in David’s mouth if he didn’t shut it; Bryan had said the same thing, too, but Neal perceived it as less than a joke.

“And it keeps you quiet,” Bryan mentioned, pointing a finger at Neal. A light in Bryan’s eyes shone through when he teasingly smiled, something Neal couldn’t recall seeing from him in over a year. “Cook yammers away so much I barely hear one word out of you. That’s real different from back in Tulsa, let me tell you.”

With a conciliatory nod Neal had to agree. There was no David Cook back in their little hometown to keep up the buzz of voices for the rest of the group, no sweet talker to act as a silent Neal’s foil. No, back home his foil was his silent partner, muted and understated, Andy always finding ways to deliver his dry wit with just a few words and a smile. In comparison, Neal was a damn motormouth in their circle of friends, and Bryan had noticed the change.

But there was another change Bryan couldn’t have noticed, had been absent too long to see: how the flip side of Neal’s coin back home was now much more than just his silent partner, much more than just a friend. “A lot’s different from back then,” he admitted vaguely.

For most people Tulsa was a location, a place; an answer to the question of “where.” For Bryan Tulsa had transformed into a “when,” a place he knew a lifetime ago, a world he left behind for the treacherous jungles of Vietnam. And in the time Bryan had made Vietnam his reality, for Neal Tulsa had become an answer to the question of “who.”

A shadow seemed to pass over Bryan’s features as he remembered the place he called home, a town he hadn’t touched or smelled or _felt_ in his veins for over a year. “I’ll bet,” he said, putting on a wry smile. “Eisenhower still in office back in the states?”

Neal couldn’t help but laugh; it was the first attempt at a joke Bryan had made since January. “Fuck off, man,” he said playfully, “hasn’t been that long.”

Bryan persisted. “Skib still have to sneak into bars through the doggie door?”

“Skib--Andy--has grown up a lot.” Neal tried to stop his mind from reaching into dirtier memories, of moments he remembered Andy on his knees but not to sneak into a bar. He bit his bottom lip hard, teeth digging into his empty piercing holes, jolting his senses before he could think about the way Andy tasted. “You’d be surprised.”

Not noticing the slight blush burning the freckles on Neal’s cheeks, Bryan shrugged, his attempt at small talk over. He looked down at his hands, the lines cut deep into each palm riddled with mud and dirt that would never come clean. “We’ve all grown up,” he said, more to himself than to Neal. “One way or another.” It took a moment for him to return from the thoughts in his mind, impeding the conversation like a roadblock, a military checkpoint into a safe zone. When he looked up at Neal again, his face held a tight, genial smile, but his eyes were closed off, guarded once more. A soldier’s way of coping, Neal thought; act like there’s nothing wrong.

“Hope I get to see them all again one day,” Bryan said, the tone in his voice a dark reminder to Neal that he didn’t mean it.

“You’ve _got_ to get back to Tulsa,” Neal stressed. Already the second tour of Vietnam was burrowing under his skin, a constant nagging itch at his sensibilities, urging Neal to rip himself limb from limb just for peace. And Bryan had never found a reprieve like Neal and David had: with his promotions from a lowly conscripted grunt up to a commanding officer, he’d been in country longer than Neal would dare to calculate. “It’s been too fucking long since you’ve been home.”

Bryan gave out one short bark of a laugh that gave away the fact he didn’t find this funny at all. “Home...” he repeated, his voice trailing off as he shook his head. “Don’t even know if it’d still feel like home now.”

The little, resigned shrug he gave Neal told him everything: just as Neal had changed over the past year, just as Andy had changed, so had everyone; so had Bryan. When his service would be over, and the government decided it would finally send Bryan back home, it might not be the same Tulsa Bryan had left. Neal saw every day--in the unaffected way his old friend passed by burned, decayed bodies, how his eyes sometimes looked hollow like he was already gone--that he’s certainly not the same Bryan that left it.

With a dismissive wave of his hand, avoiding the turn of their conversation, Bryan tried to excuse himself to some paperwork on their last encounter in the field. “More scared’a that than I am of the VC,” he joked, sidestepping his old friend in the doorway for a hasty exit.

But Neal was quicker, turning around and grabbing Bryan by the wrist. His dismissal of Neal--of Tulsa, of the lives they still had waiting for them after their tours were over--was so flippant and easy it was scaring him. It wasn’t that easy to give up on home; it _couldn’t_ be, Neal thought, for both his and Bryan’s sakes.

“Hey...” Neal’s expression was serious, his voice sincere. “Home just ain’t some town, or a house, a building,” he implored. “Home’s whatever you need it to be.”

He thought of his return to Tulsa that past winter, how the bed he slept in as a child felt too small now, the gridded streets of downtown closing in on him. Neal could turn his back on Tulsa, middle finger in the air, and never look back; but to let his Charger speed outta town he first had to have one particular passenger in the seat beside him. He thought of the way Andy’s skin smelled after sex, the salty, well-earned layer of sweat enticing him more; he thought of Andy’s smile, private and unashamed, and how it felt against his neck, against his own smiling mouth. Neal remembered Andy’s breathing, the heartbeat against his hand that he could still feel in his fingertips, and knew what home really meant to him these days.

Another soft shrug, with less enthusiasm than the last time, and Bryan was free of Neal’s grasp, and free of their conversation. They had come from the same town, drank and laughed together before they were drafted, Bryan first, then Neal; they fought alongside each other in country, saw the same combat, the same unfiltered scenes of war. But what Neal saw in Bryan’s eyes--a distant, emotionless sense of duty, and behind that, the thinnest layer of regret--told him the two soldiers were nothing alike.

“Maybe I’m not lookin’ to need it anymore,” Bryan said grimly, and went off to complete the combat report.


	21. Chapter 21

Andy had to admit to himself: bringing Kyle along as an extra pair of hands was brilliant in concept, but in practice he could’ve probably gotten the job done twice as fast alone.

“Whoops,” Kyle said as the stack of fliers fell onto the pavement. He bent down to retrieve them, releasing his grip on the ladder in the process, and Andy suddenly felt his footing grow unstable underneath him. He tried to grip the wall in front of him, hoping his own balance and luck would win out.

“How d’you have the coordination to kill it on the drums,” Andy asked him, watching the wind kick up a few stray fliers and Kyle go scrambling after them. “And yet trip over your own feet when walking?”

“Hey, I do not!” Kyle protested, his head shooting up to catch the wry smile on the other teen’s face. He grinned himself, bundling the rest of the fliers in his arms. “I totally do not.”

But proving Andy’s point, Kyle took a step towards the ladder, about to steady it once again, and stumbled, nearly losing all of the fliers again in the process. Andy couldn’t help but laugh, his younger friend taking it in stride, sheepishly rolling his eyes and smiling.

Despite the added time and effort Kyle brought to the project of putting up SDS fliers around the city, Andy was thankful he tagged along, if only for the company. He had jumped deeply back into the organization’s activities since his return from New York, attending more meetings than ever, and volunteering for anything he could fit into his schedule. But for all the people he surrounded himself with, filling every waking moment with school, music, or activism, Andy felt lonely, missing someone to genuinely talk to. Kyle, doing little more with his afternoons than watching television with his younger brother, was happy to oblige.

When Andy had handed the large stack of SDS fliers to Kyle earlier that afternoon, he informed him they were to put up the open invitations to a protest all over the downtown area, then head to the university to give them to passers-by. “Don’t tell anyone you’re doing this,” he had warned, and Kyle nodded solemnly. “Monty’ll take any extra manpower he can get, but not from any more minors, too much red tape.”

Kyle agreed to the terms, keeping mostly quiet about the nature of their task and focusing on merely spending an afternoon with a friend. When he dropped the fliers, however, he started to inspect them, reading their details as Andy--who reasonably didn’t trust Kyle on the ladder--pinned them to bulletin boards and telephone poles.

“So it’s just, like, a meeting?” he asked, the hints of an old Californian accent coming through in his tone. “Thought this group was more extreme than that. I’ve heard of riots, arrests...” He looked up, his eyes wide and unassuming, immediately apologizing. “Not you and Monty, I mean! Not here....other places.”

Andy smiled; he had heard the same kinds of rumors, especially on his trip to New York, amid the warnings that the peaceful protests the SDS supported wouldn’t be peaceful for long. He had seen Monty grumble about the fissures in the organization, different cities calling for more radical action, forcing their cause to be heard. But the change still hadn’t hit Tulsa, the organization still striving for nonviolence. Andy doubted he’d still be with the group if it were any other way.

“We’re still the good guys,” he assured Kyle, hopping off the ladder, ready to set off to the next telephone pole. “Some of us think you’ve got to fight against a war with more than just words.” He slapped a friendly hand against Kyle’s back; thankfully the sudden impact didn’t send the papers flying once more. “Thanks for helping out today, I know this isn’t really your thing.”

Kyle seemed unfazed; with his light, carefree demeanor, Andy wondered if there was anything in this world that Kyle Peek wasn’t up for on a moment’s notice. “It’s nothing,” he said, his face relieved. “ _Anything_ to get me out of the house.” With basketball in its off-season and the bevy of summer jobs still weeks away, Kyle found himself home more often than he preferred, leaving him fidgety, silent, and bored.

“It’s nothing like last winter,” he said as they walked, his eyes casting a faraway, dreamy look, so much that Andy had to steer him away from walking straight into a stop sign. He was pretty sure neither of them would be let out of their houses again if he let Kyle face a concussion. “Rehearsing every day...really getting to play my drums without the neighbors making a fuss...” He smiled brightly at the memory, how Neal and Andy let him into that inner circle of music, if only for a short time. Kyle had his first taste of the stage, playing for a crowd of people, drumming his beat into their ears and bloodstreams...and he had his first experience in a band, a true collaborative effort. He couldn’t let the rest of his life go by on just a taste.

Those same memories still dwelled in Andy’s veins, careful never to forget the heat of the stage lights, the weight of the guitar in his hands, and Neal beside him, like they were always meant to be. “We certainly had a time, didn’t we.” Andy grinned fondly but Kyle’s face broke open in a burst of energy, nodding so fiercely his shoulder-length hair tumbled right out of its ponytail.

“It was great!” he exclaimed. “The energy, the crowd...” Suddenly self-conscious of being too eager, Kyle tried to calm himself, forcing his wide grin into something vaguely resembling seriousness, and tucking his hair compulsively behind his ears. “I really miss it, playing with you guys.” But a tiny sliver of Kyle still peeked through the maturity, a plucky smile hiding behind escaped strands of hair. “I really miss _you guys._ ”

“I missed you too, Peek.” Andy wrapped an arm around Kyle’s shoulders for a hug; then, as a rule for physical masculine contact he obeyed with everyone but Neal, quickly broke the hug and mimed a punch to Kyle’s nether regions. Thankfully, the younger teen took the close hit with a flinch and a laugh, instead of an instant--and real--retaliation.

Kyle’s face lit up just at the memory of the Flytrap. “Are we gonna play again?” he asked, eyes big and eager. He couldn’t call it a reunion, since one show that Andy nearly had to beg to get didn’t mark a real start to begin with. But Kyle knew he just wouldn’t be the same if he didn’t get back on that stage. “When Neal gets back, I mean.”

The air cleared straight out of Andy’s lungs, his body stopping mid-step just at the mention of Neal’s name. Kyle was blissfully nonchalant, still smiling and warm, friendly as the day Andy and Neal met him. He had said it so easily, as if Neal were just on a weekend retreat, a summer vacation. To an innocent fifteen year old, the surface of the story was all he saw, and he thought with all certainty that Neal would return. He hadn’t caught wind of any of Neal’s letters, knew nothing of the stories told within them of death and destruction, the bleakness of hope. Unburdened by reality, Kyle was happy and oblivious, his teenage thoughts only on his drums, the driving beat in his body that begged to come out and play.

Andy wished it ever were that simple again; he wished he could feel with certainty, too, that Neal would come home to him, safe and whole.

Swallowing down the initial shock, Andy slapped a hand down on Kyle’s shoulder once again, forcing a smile. “I’d like to,” he said honestly. “Haven’t talked to Neal about it yet, but I’m sure he’d want it, too.”

He told Kyle about the connections he had made on his trip to New York; how he learned more about the business end of music than he ever could in the bars circulating the Blue Dome District. He mentioned the new songs he wrote while away, though he hadn’t the forethought, Andy admitted glumly, to include percussion tracks. And he spoke of the songs Neal had sent to him, their constant communication always at the forefront of Andy’s mind, new works he had penned from memory. Neal had more of a head for the driving beat of a song than Andy, but he couldn’t compare to Kyle’s innate sense of rhythm; they could all benefit, Andy considered, with a bit of collaboration.

Andy had never seen Kyle so excited before, his hands in a tight grip on the forgotten fliers, eyes lit up like gaslamps on full blast. “You think we might play an even bigger place than the Flytrap? Maybe even...” he paused, for whatever dramatic effect a teenager could muster. “...out of town??”

Once again Andy had to laugh at Kyle’s enthusiasm; he couldn’t tell if all the energy were for the music, the prospect of fame, or for simply spending more time with Andy and Neal. “Haven’t talked to Neal about that yet, either,” he said, suddenly realizing how much he hadn’t said to Neal about the future of their band. The music was always a given between them, measures of notes and lyrics scrawled onto a page giving them more berth, more leeway than letters ever could. Never knowing if their correspondence was monitored by the ever-watchful military, they kept their letters generic, almost bland; Andy would only claim he missed Neal, missed spending time with him, the way any man would miss a best friend. But within the songs Neal sent back were aching thoughts of holding him on cold, winter nights that now felt like a dream.

The music came first; it had always come first, Andy thought to himself, wondering why he always left questions about the band open to Neal. Why he waited for Neal to make these decisions; why, much like Kyle, he was waiting for Neal to come home to address them. The music came first, and anything else after Neal’s notes on a guitar and his words on Andy’s tongue was all gravy.

No longer in the mood to travel all the way to the college campus for a few errant fliers, Andy and Kyle took a more leisurely pace at posting the bulk around downtown. They spent more time talking about music, the new songs Andy and Neal had written, their future--the future of three musicians who, with the help of an otherworldly creative pull, were becoming a band. Andy assured Kyle that he’d mention a reunion of sorts to Neal, inspire the soldier to hurry home and begin a new life as a hopeful rockstar.

“You’ve gotta let me know if you and Neal plan on getting big and famous,” Kyle said at the end of their route, which conveniently left them at the door of the Blue Dome Diner, two teenagers in dire need of milkshakes. “If we’re touring on the road for more than a week I should probably tell my parents.”

***

>   
> _I guess I hadn’t really thought about asking you before, Neal; I mean, it just came as a given to me. You’d come back and we’d just start up again, writing songs, performing, like nothing changed. I’m still working to that goal over here, so I hope that’s what you’re aiming for, too. My parents have been talking to me about college, what I want to do with my life once I graduate this month. They’ve even got Lexie calling me and bugging me about it. And Monty and Jennie are no better, they keep telling me I can do a lot of good politically with some college work, get a degree to back up all the protesting._
> 
> _But it’s not where I see myself: not in a few months or a few years. A year of college did shit for you and I think it’ll do even less for me. Didn’t even keep you out of the army. Every time someone else tries to tell me what’ll be good for my future--my parents and college, Monty and the SDS, hell even the government itself trying to “build me character” by shipping me off to be their soldier--I think of what I really want. Being up on that stage, microphone in my face, guitar in hand. Playing all the songs we wrote. Being right there next to you through it all. College can’t give me that; only we can do that, for each other._
> 
> _Can’t wait to see our names up in lights._
> 
> _Andy_

***

Neal let his thoughts settle on the memory for a moment, Andy beside him on that stage back in December, the start of what they hoped to be greater things to come. They hadn’t needed to discuss it to know what they both wanted for their future, something Neal had felt in his bones the minute he picked up a guitar as a child. His hands itched at the thought of picking one up again, months since he penned new music and heard it from his fingers as well as in his head. It would be another month until he’d find himself back in that place, where he could hold his cherished guitar in his arms, as well as its custodian.

But a moment was all he gave himself, his memories too tempting and distracting to let them linger on further. He continued to trudge through the abandoned rice field, one foot carefully in front of the other, tiptoeing around landmines without even having to think, already second nature. Daydreams of home and the letters that awaited him in his pack were fine for the base, but out in the field Neal needed his wits about him, or he could end up dead.

The army base itself felt like a distant memory by now: the unit was on their second day of reconnaissance in the area, marching through uninhabited fields, stamping jungle mud deep into their combat boots. The region had already been cleared of hostiles--or, as Neal cynically clarified, anyone with slanted eyes and a pulse--and the unit’s new order was to make sure it remained that way. It was tedious, and Neal’s feet throbbed from the blisters forming beneath his socks, but it kept their rifles cold and their noses out of trouble. Neal suspected he couldn’t really ask for anything better.

But those thoughts kept finding their way back to the forefront of Neal’s brain, the silence in which they marched allowing his mind to wander. He had been thinking about their musical future recently, too, the ache of being without his means to make sound rooting deep into his bones. David had it easy: a natural singer, the base often heard the soldier’s voice lifting up in song, an old tune that came to his head or something new and fresh. He liked the sound of his own voice so much that David had to be silenced at times; usually when he dawdled in the shower, and usually it was Neal, chucking muddy boots and bars of soap at his head, to quiet him.

Music hadn’t left Neal’s life, though; it couldn’t, as much as the blue could drain from his eyes, the fields of freckles burn away from his skin. He kept writing songs, his mind rushing around the notes like a torrent of rain at times, thoughts and fingers too fast to get everything on paper. It kept him preoccupied and quiet on missions, reworking the music by memory, taking up his concentration. But his head was where most of those songs remained, the unit’s missions keeping him too busy to find pen and paper.

What he could record in notation he sent to Andy, searching for his feedback. Neal needed no stamps of approval--he knew the songs were damn good without anyone else’s input--but wanted to know they resonated as his songs. That Andy could pick up Neal’s guitar, play it back on a hesitant read-through, and hear Neal within the notes, see themselves in the music. He could picture it sometimes, late nights when the only thing to see in the darkness was fear: Andy sitting crossed-legged on the bed Neal had gotten to know so well, the papers splayed out in front of him, guitar in hand, singing just the way Neal had written.

He thought he almost heard him, once, the breathy whispers of a song Neal had written feverishly his first day back in Vietnam. Showing it to David the next morning, he could play it off as creative license, a work of abstracts, of true fiction. Mailing it off to Tulsa, Neal knew Andy would know better.

  

_I love you more than the moon when it shines to guide me on my way_

  

But when Neal strained to listen further, reaching out into a foreign night for a familiar voice, he realized that it was just the wind, playing tricks with his hearing.

Neal only wished that the wind was still playing tricks; unfortunately, that really was David’s voice next to him, incessantly yammering on.

“God-fuckin’- _damn_ , it’s hot here!” David let out a low whistle as he wiped the sweat from his brow, even more sweat forming immediately afterwards to take its place. “Hotter than home, that’s for damn sure...and less humid there, too. Feels like I’m sittin’ in a tub of hot water--” Neal felt an elbow poke at his side, David now physically requesting his attention. “--But I’d need less clothes and more of those girls from Chu Lai for a tub, eh?”

David grinned, poking Neal again for some kind of response, a chuckle or even just a smile, at his joke. But all he received in turn was a glare from cold blue eyes, Neal glancing to his side just enough to show David his displeasure, his jaw jutting out in a sneer. It was bad enough David was running his mouth all day, on a mission where silence was a virtue; he wasn’t going to add to the noise, or worse, encourage him.

Smiling brighter, David seemed unaffected by Neal’s glare. “What?” he shrugged in jest. “Do you think you’re intimidating and scary?” With playful, narrowed eyes David stared right back at him, as if scrutinizing Neal, and then pulled back, his decision made. “You’re not scary at all.”

Any other time and David’s persistent optimism, his damn unstoppable _pleasantness_ would have broken Neal down, gotten him to reluctantly shake his head and laugh along with him. But there was a strain to David’s easygoing nature that day that felt less than genuine, not as easy as he would have liked. He was trying too hard, again, to keep a strong, happy front, smiling a little too wide, projecting his voice a little too loudly. Neal wondered if David’s mood was brought on just by nerves over the reconnaissance, or if another letter had come from his family, bearing more bad news.

Either way, Neal wasn’t the only one getting irritated by the sound of David’s voice. “Would’ya get him to shut up already, Tiemann?!” came the shout from Bryan, flanking Neal’s other side, keeping the respectable textbook distance between them while David was nearly marching on top of him. Last year Neal would have searched for the humor in Bryan’s tone, looked to his right to find an old friend grinning at him, waiting for Neal’s grudgingly happy retort. But it was not last year; the old friend had been replaced with a cold, distant commanding officer, one that barely resembled the Bryan Jewett Neal had known. He didn’t even bother to turn his head and look for him; Neal already knew he was gone.

“Wouldn’t do any fuckin’ good,” he answered back, only to feel the glow of David beaming triumphantly next to him. Neal continued on the march as David’s mouth continued a run of its own.

“That’s right, can’t shut me up so easy,” David boasted; his attention and his words turned away from his friend, allowing Neal to block out David’s voice and focus on his thoughts and the task at hand.

Rushing out of the base on their reconnaissance orders, Neal barely had the time to strap on his boots, much less respond to the latest batch of letters from home. He had been eager to read through Andy’s, as always, the familiar handwriting on the envelope alone sending him into a sense of calm that couldn’t be marred for hours. In his last letter Neal had sent him what new songs he could record on paper, charting them down furiously in the rare moments of peace and sanity at base. The minor chords and lyric imagery coming forth from his pen were darker than anything Neal had sent over before, the songs reflecting the bleakness soldiers found in country, the empty death that crept into everything. It was a musical path so different from the one Andy’s songs seemed to take, the ones he had written in New York so full of life, and hope. Neal had hoped their paths weren’t too different, beyond a point of compromise, and he looked to Andy’s response to guide their answer.

But the quick scan of Andy’s letter gave him only the lightest of critical responses, Andy commenting on the songs’ musical tones and the technical aspects of each piece, but nothing on their content, their intentions. It troubled Neal; it was Andy himself who wrote to him months ago, livid over Neal’s tepid letters full of lies, saying they shouldn’t bullshit each other, to not hold anything back. And here Andy was, holding back.

It could have been a conscious step back, Andy seeing something deeper in the songs than just the notes on a page, deciding to give Neal a wide berth to continue on this creative path. Or it could have been a restriction, Andy deliberately keeping silent to hold back critical thoughts on his tongue; and if he were, then what else could he have omitted? Either way the silence ate away at Neal’s confidence, his concentration, eroding the complete trust he had in his music, in Andy. He needed Andy as his confidant, his rock; everything would fall apart if he began to second-guess Andy, too.

With a deep sigh Neal made up his mind, his thoughts on the letters he left miles away at base camp and not on the terrain before him--and certainly not on David’s speech about the goat dung he just stepped in. When Neal’s words rang false in his letters, Andy called him out on it, his response so biting and real it shocked Neal back into honesty. Perhaps a letter of his own--calling Andy out on the omissions, claiming Neal gets enough bullshit from Uncle Sam to accept it from his best friend--would do the same.

More than the critical eye, more than envisioning the future of their fledgling band, Neal wanted the truth from Andy about his songs, the entire truth, just as Neal wrote the truth in their chords. The music meant too much to him to let it go; and now, Andy meant too much, as well.

Drawing in his bottom lip between his teeth, subconsciously finding the slowly healing holes where his piercings used to be, Neal thought back to that familiar voice and that familiar song. He hadn’t heard Andy sing it yet, but he had no doubt it would move him more than he’d ever expect, a marriage of talent and purpose, the exact right song sung by the exact right man. 

  

_‘Cause all I ever wanted was to hold you by my side_

  

So distracted from their mission, Neal was already drafting his next letter to Andy in his head when the first bullets cut through the air.

“We’ve got fire!” someone bellowed in the unit, and immediately Neal’s attention perked up, his eyes wide and his weapon hefted to his shoulder.

“Where’s it coming from?” Bryan shouted, his gun also at the ready.

A few pops of a rifle at first, flying from the trees surrounding the rice field. A rogue VC, Neal thought, searching for enough distraction to escape from the oncoming grunts. Or even a farmer desperately trying to reclaim his land from the encroaching army. Either way, a minor disturbance, one the soldiers could easily dispatch, if only they could find the shots’ origin within the trees...

But a few more shots whizzed around them, from different directions this time, buzzing about like deadly flies. This was not one single shooter; this was a trap.

With eyes as wide and blue as the cloudless sky above them, Neal tried to catch a beat on where the shooters might have been hiding. More familiar _pop_ sounds filled the air, faster now, like the quick, successive beats of a snare. No rifle could have gotten those off in that time; the hostiles had to be playing with AK-47s. The grass they waded through was tall and thick, but gave them no protection or shelter; Neal heard the reeds snap with the impact of a bullet rushing through the field. And the entire unit was out in it, marching slow and lazy, reaching the end of their mission and finding no resistance.

Here was their resistance, and it could kill them all.

On instinct Neal started firing, though he had no direction, no target. He had gotten uncomfortably used to the kick of the M-16 in his arms as he pulled the trigger, feeling the bullet shells pop out of the magazine with each press. He heard shouts around him but they were drowned out by the gunfire, first from his own weapon, then from the rest of the unit. Everyone else was shooting blind, too.

“Take cover!”

“We gotta pull back!”

“Where are they?! _Where the fuck are they??_ ”

Their unit had faced surprise attacks before, but never when they were so out in the open, never when they had so least expected it. Neal could see from the corner of his eye men running, fleeing the open fields, trying to reach the safety of the tree cover around them. But the trees were at least two hundred feet from their unit, a distance that felt like miles now; he tried to give them backup firepower, tried to make a run for it himself, but then shots rang out from the covered darkness again, and they ran no more.

Another anguished scream came from the unit, closer to Neal this time; so close, he thought, he could feel it reverberate in his bones, even over the adrenaline pumping through his blood. They were horribly out of formation now, every man looking to his own safety, saving his own ass; he had no way to tell besides looking behind him, and now, any attention pulled away from the incoming fire could be deadly.

But quickly he remembered exactly who had been standing beside him before the gunfire erupted, who had been laughing, clapping Neal on the shoulder, trying so hard to keep the unit--and himself--in good spirits.

“Dave!” he bellowed, and against his better judgment turned his head, his eyes scanning quickly for his friend. Shouting out David’s name was no use; Neal could barely hear his own voice in the chaos, the sounds of gunfire mixed with screams and tongues both English and foreign. Neal held his weapon to his shoulder, trying in vain to both aim and search for David at the same time. “Cook, where the fuck--”

He turned around again, towards the treeline, ready to set off another round of shots from his M-16 when a sharp blow stopped him in his tracks. Neal stumbled, unable to keep his balance, the momentum too powerful to fight against. A stinging pain ran up his arm, like every pinprick of the tattoo needles he received in his life jamming into his nerves all at once. The pain quickly became so unbearable he could hardly think; his gun, suddenly so slippery and his hands uncoordinated, fell from his grasp. 

  

_And all I ever wanted was gone_

  

Neal tried to reach for it, knowing he was a dead man without his weapon. But his balance was still off, his mind unable to focus on anything but the pain in his hand. He stumbled and fell, his head connecting with something hard on the ground; with that the pain finally ceased, and Neal’s world crashed into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song lyrics are from MWK's song [Forever Fall](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mwk2) off of their self-titled album.


	22. Chapter 22

>   
> _June 1, 1969_
> 
> _Dear Andy,_
> 
> _I never wanted to write this kind of letter to you._
> 
> _I told Neal--I fucking warned him months ago, the big jerk--that I wasn’t going to write back home for him, break it to his best friend when he finally bit it in combat. Say what a great guy he was, a great soldier, all that shit the army’ll never tell you or you already know. I’ve written dozens of those letters...too many. And I told Neal, not for him. He just wasn’t allowed to die._
> 
> _So far, the son of a bitch is keeping his promise._
> 
> _I know I’ve never written to you before, and I hope this isn’t too jarring. Neal and I became good friends during our first tour in Vietnam, we kept in touch; I went back home to Blue Springs the same time he came back to you guys in Tulsa. He’s told me all about you: you play music, you sing, you’re best friends...really the best, I know I’m never gonna compete. Even showed me a few of your letters, but only a few, mostly ones with songs he wanted me to take a look at, just to get the satisfaction of me nodding and telling him they were great. The rest he always kept close to him, folding them away in his pockets so he always knew they were there. He’d read them at all hours, way past lights out when he thought no one was looking. (He thinks he’s good at being sneaky, but you and I both know better.)_
> 
> _And, this letter isn’t meant to intrude on any of that. You’re best friends, I know that. What you’ve got there, you two, it’s special...almost sacred. I’d think it was more than a little weird if Neal just started writing my brothers ‘cause he felt the urge._
> 
> _But, the thing is, in the months since I’ve met him, really gotten to know Neal, he’s become one of my friends, too. With our diminishing number in the unit, I’d say my best. And saying that, I’ve got a responsibility to send this on to you, even if Neal would hate me writing it. For damn sure I know I’d want to hear about it straightaway, if I were you._
> 
> _I’m sorry that this is the way we’ve got to talk for the first time; believe me, I wish it could be anything else._
> 
> _We were on a reconnaissance mission through some regions the units ahead of us had listed as free zones--free to consider anyone found in that area as hostile. It was the second day of marching and finding nothing; we should have packed it in, I guess, no one expected to find anyone alive in that area, much less a threat. It was midday, always the hottest hour in Vietnam, and we were dying of heat out in a rice field. We were tired, and hot, and we had our guards down. I wouldn’t ever use that to excuse what happened, or take away my blame or anyone else’s. It’s just telling you what happened, telling you everything. I think if it were Neal writing to you he’d want it that way._
> 
> _We received heavy machine gun fire from the treeline; we later found out it was a small tactical team of VietCong who were also regrouping in the area, seeing if they could reclaim the territory. They usually only attack at night, but our unit surprised them, so they took it upon themselves to return the favor._
> 
> _Of course we exchanged fire, but haphazardly at first; they were hiding behind the dense treeline, and took us completely off-guard. We had more manpower, twenty of us in a unit next to eight of them, and soon--eventually--we got the upper hand. But it wasn’t soon enough._
> 
> _It ended up being pretty messy, and I don’t envy the officer who has to write up the combat report about this. We got ‘em all--supposed to take them with as little force as necessary, see if we can get information from any prisoners, but there’s always a big difference between the protocol written down in army manuals and what actually happens in combat when everything is going down. It was the first time I killed somebody, I mean really killed them; I’ve shot at hostiles before, couldn’t keep my head if I hadn’t, and I’m sure I’ve hit more than a few of them. But this was the first time I killed one of them up close, after we regrouped and overtook them, close enough to see the AK-47 shaking in his hands. My God...he couldn’t have been older than eighteen, no older than you. It’s been eating me up since we’ve gotten back to base, seeing that VC’s face, looking in his eyes as I shot him._
> 
> _But at that moment? Out in that field, hearing all my buddies screaming and shouting in pain, smelling the gunpowder and the blood in the air...I was glad to kill him for what he did to my unit, my friends. I felt justified, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat._
> 
> _And yeah, we got them all, made sure they were good and dead, but they took their toll on us, too. Three of our guys were gone, and a lot more wounded, including Neal._
> 
> _Neal..._
> 
> _I was the one who found him. The grass was so tall and dense it was tough to see anything, most of our unit was finding the wounded from the groans rising up from the ground. I couldn’t hear nothing from Neal, nothing, it was terrifying me. But I found him, lying in the field after the shots died down; wasn’t going to just leave him there, I couldn’t. He was unconscious, I think his head hit a rock when he went down. His hand...lying limply on his chest, covered in blood, it was all over the front of his uniform. Fuck, I would’ve thought him dead if I didn’t know that Neal’s a stubborn jerk who won’t be taken down from just one ambush. For a few minutes I still thought it._
> 
> _The medevac helicopter was called and they got to us pretty fast; I made sure Neal was on the first lift back to the base hospital. If he didn’t die outright from that ambush, I was gonna make damn sure he stayed alive._
> 
> _That’s where he is right now, the hospital; that’s where I am, too, though there’s nothing wrong with me, barely even a bruise, but I convinced them to let me stay, just for an hour or two. He’s in surgery right now, for the hand, I guess, and maybe for the knock on his head. No one’s come out and told me anything, but I don’t expect it, I’m not supposed to be here waiting to hear the news, anyway. But I’m gonna find out, even if I have to bribe every doctor and flirt with every nurse in this hospital, even the ugly ones. And I’m gonna tell you about it, Andy, the minute I find out how he’s doing myself. I’d be a wreck without knowing--fuck, I’m a wreck now\--and I know it’d be the same for you._
> 
> _I’ve got a good feeling about this, though. I know, everyone says that, you hear it all the time: this guy’s strong, he’ll be a fighter, blah, blah...regardless of whether they’re actually strong enough to survive. But you don’t hear that too often in the army, no one’s got the balls to lie that badly to you; no one’s got much of the energy, either. You say enough times that some guy is a strong, good soldier and then they just up and die on you, you stop believing it, and start wondering if any of us can get out of here alive. Soldiers don’t say this kind of stuff lightly._
> 
> _But Neal...you know Neal. And if there’s one thing our friend is, it’s a stubborn son of a bitch. That bastard will argue the time of day with a clock; he tried his damndest for weeks to resist being my friend, staying that sulky, irritable curmudgeon we (for some reason) know and love. I’ve seen soldiers with much harsher combat wounds come out of surgery fresh as rain, picking up a rifle and nearly skipping right back into the jungle; and none of them with the kind of resolve like Neal. If one doctor thinks he won’t make it, Neal’ll be his own doctor, give his own diagnosis, just to prove he can._
> 
> _He’s gonna make it through this, Andy, I’d bet money on it._
> 
> _I’ll let you know everything once they tell me. The army doesn’t like to admit weaknesses; they won’t send Neal’s family any information unless the wound’s too serious for him to return to combat, or he dies. And either way, they’ll never send you anything. I don’t even know how much the doctors here will let me know, but oh, they’ll tell me, believe me._
> 
> _This letter doesn’t really tell you a whole lot right now, and for that I’m truly sorry. But I had to write it to you, immediately, just so you knew everything that I did, so you weren’t left out. It might freak you out to only know Neal’s wounded and nothing else--yeah, I remember last year, he couldn’t stop laughing for a solid fifteen minutes over your eight pages of curses and threats after his hospital stay. And Neal might end up hating me for writing to you, letting you know about his condition before he could._
> 
> _But...I had to write it. Fuck Neal’s pride; fuck both of your egos. You needed to know, and I won’t regret writing this no matter how much you both bitch about it later. (And oh, he’ll bitch, I know this already--I don’t know how you dealt with him as your friend for so long, do you ever have to muzzle him in public?) I think, regardless of who sent the letter...Neal wouldn’t want you to be in the dark. He would want you to know._
> 
> _Hopefully the next letter you get won’t be from me, but from the genuine article himself. He’ll want to make sure I’m not spreading rumors about him to his friends back home--and, I’m sure, that you’re not making up rumors of your own and sending them on here. And hey, with any luck, this could send Neal straight outta the jungles and right back to you Okies in no time._
> 
> _Hope everything is going well with you._
> 
> _David Cook  
> _

***

They all dreaded this kind of letter: housewives forever nervously straightening their skirts and aprons, staring out the window for signs of the mailman; high school sweethearts still diligently waiting for a ring, fearing it may never come. Best friends who still felt the breath of a kiss in memory, the press of fingers on thighs. He had talked about it with Jennie before, whose fears were now permanently allayed ever since her boyfriend returned from his one-year conscription, healthy and whole. It happened more often than the public would even admit, Monty told him after a meeting, and far more than the government would ever acknowledge. 

They were the letters written in an unfamiliar hand, by unfamiliar soldiers and officers the folks back home would never meet. Stories of bravery and camaraderie, how Johnny or Billy was the best damn little soldier there’d ever been, deserved a Congressional medal, no matter how shitty his shot or how yellow his liver actually was. They talked about valor and honor, kindness and love--always love. That their little boy left home, became a man in the violent jungles of Vietnam...and would return to them, now, as a corpse.

With barely a month left to Neal’s tour--a home stretch, he bragged in his last letter, he could almost endure that time standing on his head--Andy felt confident he’d never be the recipient of such a letter. It had been so long now--almost half a year since Neal had gone back, and over a year in combat total--and Neal had more than survived the ordeal. He already had his scare in the army hospital already, his weeks being coddled for shell shock and making buddies with his international health team. Andy nearly had a heart attack then, and it was Neal himself in his letters telling him not to freak out. They had their one close call, the one that knocked some sense into Andy’s brain and his body. One was enough.

Andy had been busy, filling up the spaces in his day when he’d miss Neal the most, working with Monty on projects for the SDS while showing his face inside enough classrooms to warrant graduation. Neal would miss the ceremony by a few weeks, and while he apologized for it in his last letter, saying that since Andy sat through Neal’s mind-numbing commencement that Neal should do the same, Andy was hardly fazed. School had only been a distraction tool for Andy for months, an excuse to keep Uncle Sam and his impending green fatigues at bay. Losing one overbearing institution and gaining another in a few months was nothing to commemorate. And besides, he’d find other things to celebrate with Neal, in ways that did not need an audience.

His mind was distracted with those very thoughts, his grinning cheeks dappled with a growing flush as he thumbed through the daily mail. But he couldn’t miss the letter at the bottom of the stack, so identical to the ones Neal sent regularly his parents would not have given it a second glance. Same military-grade paper, same postage, even arriving from the same army base. Andy saw it and his heart instantly dropped to his stomach, the rest of the mail falling from his hands. He was the only one in the Skib house who could tell the difference.

The letter was addressed in loopy, carefully gauged handwriting, a shocking change from Neal’s familiar chicken scratch. This wasn’t his handwriting. The letter hadn’t come from Neal.

He carefully unwrapped the envelope, already dreading what he would find inside. Andy read through David’s letter once, twice, his body unmoving, lungs barely pulling in breath. It was only when David’s words on the page, words like _surgery_ and _killed_ and _covered in blood_ , had become too blurry to read that Andy realized his hands were shaking.

Heavy fire...surgery...Neal’s head, his hand...

He should have never been so complacent, Andy cursed at himself, suddenly aware of the soft rustling noises the trembling letter made in his grasp. Should have never thought that a month left in country meant an easy ticket home. He knew Neal had thought the same way, that he could hold his breath and click his heels and before either of them knew it he’d be home. Had he been just as confident as Andy, just as careless? They had both seen enough shoot-’em-ups at the movie theater: the minute the young grunt, or the optimistic cowboy, or anyone within range of a gun starts making plans, talking about home and the future and a sweetheart they left behind, and _bam_ \--the bullet comes out of nowhere and all those hopes are dashed. It was so cliché that if Andy were watching himself on a movie screen he’d laugh at the irony.

He wasn’t laughing now. His mouth dry and his jaw refusing to unclench, Andy could barely move. He clenched his hands tighter around the pages, willing them to stop shaking, but they only worsened until he had to close his eyes to the trembling letter, to the words on the page.

Even with his eyes closed he could still recall the date at the top of the letter; as with all military mail the letter had taken the scenic route from South Asia to reach this Tulsa doorstep, and the information it carried was now a week old. Andy couldn’t blame the letter any, he always knew the speed the mail would pass, but it still left a cold shudder down his spine. The urgency in David’s letterr...it already passed, with days lapsing in between.

Unconsciously Andy drew his lower lip in between his teeth, biting down nervously, the seeds of worry in his mind quickly sprouting and growing fruit. A week had already passed...Neal would have already been out of surgery, as strong and stubborn as ever if David’s words held true. Maybe his own letter was making its way along the long postal routes to Andy’s door, playing down the battle, bragging about his new war wound, playfully instructing Andy to greet him next month like a hero.

Or what if there was no other letter on its way, because--

Andy bit down sharply on his lip, drawing a thin line of blood, filling his senses with the raw scent and taste. Something tightened in his gut, as if a phantom hand reached into his abdomen and twisted, pulling the air from his lungs, making him nearly double over. He thought he might throw up right there in the front room; if he hadn’t skipped breakfast, he surely would have.

What if this meant no more letters, no more songs; no more thoughts scrawled onto yellowed paper, truths a soldier could only send to his best friend. The thoughts compounded on each other, the air in the front room feeling thinner, his stomach growing tighter: _no letters, no songs...no music, no smile, no hearing that voice and that laugh, no Neal\--_

There was a sharp tightening in his throat, and suddenly the air inside became too stifling to breathe. Still clutching the letter in hand, Andy reached for the doorknob on instinct, holding a strained breath in his chest, as if the house had just filled with water, a giant fish tank, and to breathe meant to die. All he knew at that moment, all that ran through his mind, was he had to get out, had to get away. From what--and even to where--didn’t matter.

He burst out the door to an ever-growing gray sky, the perfectly blue skies of June giving way to a premature summer storm. A cold foreboding wind hit his face as he walked down the drive, rounded the corner, hit the pavement with an ever increasing pace. But he paid the skies no mind, his brain entirely focused on keeping his legs moving and his heart beating. He just needed to get out, no matter where his legs took him; he had to be anywhere else but in that room with that letter.

Andy ran.

It didn’t matter where his legs took him, feet pounding against the asphalt in his Chucks too inappropriate for running, his lungs heaving in the brisk air, the charged air breezing into his face and around his limbs. They’d know, he figured; his body would instinctively tell him where to get away. He realized later that he would have run until his legs gave out underneath him, until his body collapsed and found no more energy within him to move. Mindlessly taking the streets of Tulsa at top speed, he knew he couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow down, until he reached his destination.

Before even realizing it the gridded, urban streets of downtown blurred and faded into suburban lawns and tract houses, coming to a point down to a familiar clapboard and brick house hedged by private woods. The driveway was empty, save for the lonely Charger, its engine silent and cold, patiently waiting for the key in its ignition, to be revved up and driven, taken far as its tires would go.

He should have known, once he saw the house in the distance, felt it in his bones like it was his second home, that his body would have taken him here.

The slate gray clouds overhead finally made good on their rumbling threat, letting the first droplets of rain fall as Andy reached Neal’s house. His hasty exit left him with only the clothes on his back, a well-worn and well-loved t-shirt and jeans, and with no jacket the cold drizzle stung at his skin. But he sought no shelter from the oncoming rain, not underneath the covered porch or inside, through the kitchen door he knew would be open to him. The house, he realized, hadn’t been his destination at all.

Letting his legs carry him, Andy didn’t stop, past the house and the familiar car in the driveway, and through the back yard. The gray clouds billowing overhead brought a ghostly look to the worn treehouse, the dull, bare wooden slats staring down at Andy from its perch, untouched for over a year. The last, solid vestige of Neal’s childhood was completely useless now, the fragile frame too small to ever hold a real soldier, a man. It stood pathetically in its tree, overlooking the driveway and everything else Neal left behind, slowly deteriorating, as if it knew in the knots of its wood that the little boy who played and dreamed within its walls was gone.

Andy felt the treehouse’s presence mocking him with each rung of the ladder; and still he climbed, the splintered, precarious wood digging into the heels of his hands, wet with rain. He remembered the last time he ascended this treehouse, over a year and a lifetime ago, Neal decked out in combat green, his uniform so foreign and new Andy could still pick out the factory creases. It had meant to be a last goodbye between best friends, an unexplainable driving force that brought Andy to Neal’s doorstep that February morning. That same force brought him here again, to this door, up the worn wooden ladder, but for very different reasons.

When he reached the top he peered inside before pulling himself in, his eyes level with the floorboards. Empty but for a layer of dust and pollen, the treehouse held so much more than mere bodies for Andy: it held memories. The smell of the wood grain in the familiar, cramped space brought him back instantly to that last morning, two teens almost too scared to even speak, their legs touching calf to thigh. He saw in his mind’s eye the whispers between him and Neal, the soft admission he was scared for Neal, for himself; for the future. And he remembered how it felt the first time Neal kissed him, a touch so light upon his lips he wondered now if he had only dreamed it all. But when Andy’s eyes fluttered closed and he responded, pressing his lips to Neal’s for the first time, Andy would always know it was no dream.

It had been the first kiss of many, the months apart letting them pick up where they left off; but that kiss was destined to be cut short, the ever-encroaching duty of fate pouncing upon them. Andy swallowed a lump forming in his throat at he remembered the car horn blaring, the startled jump of their bodies as they pulled apart. The memories cut short then, like a film reel snapping in the middle of a scene, celluloid spinning helplessly on its reel.

Andy closed his eyes, taking in a shuddering breath, not wanting to remember the heaviness in his chest when he watched Neal descend this very ladder and disappear from view. He hadn’t known if they’d ever see each other again then, too, but at that time it had all felt so abstract, the possibilities too far into imagination. Now, those fears were made concrete, as real as the steel in a bullet and the ink on a page.

The letter...as Andy hoisted himself into the treehouse, hearing it groan from a man’s full weight, he only realized now that he still held it in his fist, clenched tightly even as he was scaling the wooden ladder. It was spotted with the first droplets of rain but none of the ink failed or bled, David Cook’s grim message as clear as the hour it was written. Even if it had been melted into pulp from the rain, Andy thought, the lump in his throat growing larger until it came out a strangled sob, he could still recall every word, the events it described still very real.

Both the letter and its recipient were sheltered now from the weather, the rain growing heavier and steady around him, the treehouse a thin, precarious barrier to getting soaked. With a deep sigh Andy rested his head against the wall, seated in the same place he had been over a year ago, but now, no one was by his side.

The teasing drizzle that followed him to the treehouse turned quickly into rain, and then slid further into a downpour, beating like a dampened bass against the roof, steady and fast. Andy let the sound overtake him, fill his senses, the water coming down in waves washing out the muddle of emotions threatening to sweep him under.

Fuck, if Neal wasn’t okay...if he never got to see his face again...

With the letter detailing his soldier’s fate clasped in his hands, Andy let Neal’s name slip from his mouth in a whisper, dissipating into the driving rain as he let the sky cry for him.


	23. Chapter 23

_He’s not dead. He’s not dead._

David kept repeating the mantra in his mind, slumping his head into his hands, staring only at the floor. Periodically the fingers at his scalp would dig in and tug, pulling at the short hairs as best they could, the sharp pain temporarily taking his mind off other things. His thoughts occasionally drifted elsewhere as he waited out the surgery, blending into the wall at the field hospital: sometimes David thought about how worse off the mission could have been, the entire unit could’ve been decimated by just a few rogue VC. Hollowly he praised himself for quick thinking on the battlefield, the unit might’ve never gotten out of there alive without him, and Neal certainly not. If he survived, David might just get a fucking medal out of the deal.

But then his thoughts inevitably led back to Neal, the surgery so long and the doctors so silent David had no idea what to expect. His only solace was that the surgery still went on, hours after they Medevac’ed Neal in from the abandoned rice field. They wouldn’t spend all this time operating on a lost cause.

He was digging into his seventh hour of pacing and staring at his boots, his desperately hopeful pleas of _he’s not dead, he’s not dead_ reaching beyond the walls of the hospital and stretching across an ocean, when another pair of shoes approached his, standing toe-to-toe.

“You shouldn’t be here, soldier,” he heard the grim voice above him, and David sighed. Nearly every hour he’d been side-eyed by MPs and military doctors, noticing quickly that David himself was in no physical pain and the blood on his fatigues was not his. Each time he made an excuse, coming up with a quick lie just to stay a little longer, until Neal’s surgery was over. The last time he hadn’t even kept up appearances, and simply gave the nurse a dark, menacing glare, and planted his ass firmly back into his chair.

“I know, but--” he began, lifting his head to meet the eyes of his interloper, catching sight of a stately body and a faded white doctor’s coat. When he met the man’s eyes, he saw disapproval, yet sympathy there as well, and a spark of familiarity David had not expected to see.

Dr. Johns frowned David, who immediately bolted to his feet at the sight of an old friend. He had grown friendly with David the previous year, when the soldier doted at the bedside of his friend; he only wished the circumstances of their reunion weren’t so similar. “Cook,” he said sadly, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t be here at all.”

A look of surprise and relief washed over David’s face. Finally, someone familiar in this hospital; someone who wouldn’t kick him back out to the front lines. Maybe now he could actually get some answers instead of curt stares... “Dr. Johns!” he exclaimed, then quickly dropped the formalities for a friend.

“ _Mike,_ ” he entreated, his voice low and desperate. If anyone heard a lowly grunt addressing an international officer in such a manner, he’d be on latrine duty for weeks; but he had to chance it, his friendship with the doctor nearly all he had. “You gotta let me stay, please. I wouldn’t normally ask, but I need the favor. I’ve been waiting...see, it’s....it’s Neal. He’s--”

“I know,” Johns held his hands up to stop the flow of David’s words. “About Neal.” It took a moment for David to realize the doctor’s gloved hands were stained red with blood, fresh from surgery; in a second moment his eyes widened with the knowledge it was Neal’s blood.

Quickly recognizing the shocked look on David’s face, Michael hid his hands behind his back, his white coat and surgical vestments also holding the telltale signs of a long, painstaking surgery. He cleared his throat, wrenching David’s attention away from his hidden hands--which David’s gaze had followed, the macabre fascination too compelling to look away. “Records say he was caught in enemy fire,” he said.

With a grave nod David confirmed the story, and provided Johns with the details of the day’s ambush, still vivid in his mind from writing them all down in his letter to Andy, only a few hours before. When he finished his voice sounded hollow, defeated; his skin pale and clammy with worry, Michael could have very well admitted him for illness or exhaustion.

“You’re the one who called the Medevac?” he asked, and David nodded.

“They got our radio man in the throat; had to pry the receiver from him, but I got the call in alright.” He remembered the new soldier: a young, Hispanic boy from the Southwest, had only arrived in country a month or so before. David could see the soldier crumpled to the ground beneath him, laying in a pool of blood, unmoving. He had only reached for the radio strapped to the soldier’s back, not for a pulse, not to see if he could save him; something inside David told him the poor kid was already dead. “I stayed with Neal, made sure they took him out first.” When he looked back into Michael’s eyes, he saw a grim sadness there that told him he’d heard this story far too many times before. “Gotta save the ones you can, right?”

The doctor knew that fact all too well. “You worked fast, David,” he said in quick congratulations--whatever gratitude could be given inside a field hospital. “Probably saved his life.” Michael gave a weak smile, remembering the last time Cook had brought in a wounded man. Same man, and same unflinching loyalty. “That’s twice you’ve saved his life--guess he really owes you now.”

David didn’t seem to hold the same sentiment. He paused for a beat, staring at his hands, before answering, “Yeah...I’m gonna wait till he’s conscious to hold him to that.” His voice grew smaller, a lump in his throat causing him to force the words past his tongue. “He will be conscious, doc...right?”

“He should be in the recovery area now,” Johns replied, omitting the fact that Neal was being wheeled out of surgery simply because they needed the space. Much like the war itself, the field hospital was far from forgiving. Michael moved to place a reassuring hand on David’s shoulder but stopped, his hand aloft, when he realized he was still bloody from surgery. David shrugged, and pointed to his own stained fatigues, to show he was no stranger to wearing Neal Tiemann’s blood.

When the doctor’s hand did fall upon David’s shoulder, the doors to the operating room opened up to allow a gurney to pass through, a bandaged soldier lying in twilight on its stained sheets. Even if David couldn’t see the soldier’s eyes or the familiar ginger-blond hair, the ink along Neal’s neck, running down to the length of his forearm, clearly gave him away. It pained David to notice the criss-cross of scars and stitches now joining the intricate tattoos, all ending in a large gauze bandage wrapped around his left hand, bigger than a boxing glove. He swallowed hard.

“Neal...” he whispered, though in the buzz of the crowded hospital he knew it could not carry to Neal’s ears. “What’dya do to him, Mike...”

With his eyes transfixed on the soldier on the gurney, David did not see the bleak frown on Michael’s face, but he felt the squeeze of the hand at his shoulder, and the doubt that went along with it. “Everything I could do,” the doctor replied, his stare also turning to his patient.

“Jesus.” David shook his head slowly, unable to imagine that only a few hours before they had been bullshitting each other on the mission, lobbing playful catcalls to one another, and now Neal was on a gurney, his eyes half-lidded in an anesthetic haze, staring unseeing towards the ceiling. And his hand; oh, fuck, his hand... “It looks bad,” he admitted. “I mean, it was bad in the field, but I thought I got to him fast enough--” David looked quickly over at Johns, panicked accusation in his tone. “--You told me I got to him fast enough--”

“You did, and you saved his life,” Johns said again, as David’s eyes went back to Neal, the operating nurses leaving his side to tend to other patients.

“But that thing--” David motioned towards the bandage on Neal’s hand. “It’s a fucking catcher’s mitt! I can’t even see his fingers...” The color suddenly drained from David’s face. “Please God tell me he still has fingers.”

“The bullet went through the opisthenar--the back of the hand,” he began, pointing to the entry location on himself. “And lodged in the thumb’s proximal phalanx, here.” Johns turned his hand over and pointed at the heel of his hand, less than an inch from his wrist.

David concentrated as best he could on what Johns was showing him, but the difference between indicating on a healthy, whole hand, and picturing a bullet tearing through those areas, leaving horrific destruction in its wake, was tremendous. “‘Lodged,’” his mind stuck on the word; he had seen it often in combat, bullets ripping through flesh and nestling somewhere inside a body, the lead poisoning a soldier from the inside.

Michael took a deep sigh. “No exit wound,” he admitted. “Did what I could; I extracted as much of the bullet as I could find. But there’s still some fragments left, close to the wrist bones; too delicate of an area to really dig in.”

A flashing look of horror crossed David’s face; immediately Michael felt he needed to defend his actions in the operating room. “This is a field hospital, Cook,” he reminded the soldier. “Our primary concern is making sure the death games you play out there don’t work. Every other bastard in this country is looking to kill people, and I’m here to keep you alive. That’s all I’m here for.” Sadness crept into the doctor’s voice; so many times, with so many soldiers, he couldn’t even do that. “Your mate’s lucky his hand is even still there.”

The look on David’s face subsided with a deep sigh of relief; both he and Johns knew all too well how easily a man could leave Vietnam with fewer limbs than he came in. “Thank God,” he breathed, finally allowing himself to imagine the inked fingers underneath that bandage, Neal’s hand injured but still whole.

“There’s some nerve damage,” Johns explained, “But without the right equipment I can’t tell the severity. Back in Perth my hospital has state of the art diagnostics, the best damn orthopedic doctors in all Australia...” he shook his head, imagining the resources he could have laid out for Neal in a better, more peaceable place. But, he thought, twenty-year olds don’t get an AK-47 round to the palm in Perth.

David’s thoughts were far from Australia; they were around the world, across an ocean and a year’s back in time, when he had first met Neal in basic training back in Texas. He’d had his guitar then, a trusty acoustic his father had bought him for his birthday, and Neal, itching for practice, would play it. The music Neal could coax from that guitar...the grace in his notes, the magic he put forth through his nimble fingers... And the passion Neal had, the devotion to his craft that had him penning tabs from memory in stinking, sweaty jungles, not even letting the absence of a guitar silence the music in his head.

“He plays guitar,” he said aimlessly, remembering the colorfully inked fingers flying across his guitar’s neck, the smile on Neal’s face. “Nerve damage...but, he plays guitar...”

He looked helplessly at Dr. Johns, searching for the answer to the question he was too afraid to ask; but answers were something Michael was far too short on. “If I had the resources, he’d be in and out, right as rain,” he said. But the hospital barely had enough supplies and manpower to keep these boys from turning septic, dying of infection and malnutrition; advanced orthopedic surgery was, literally, a world away. “Instead I had to install a screw here--” he pointed to the palm of his hand, and David shuddered, imagining Neal’s palm open and raw in the operating room. “To keep the bones in the wrist from breaking. It might affect his dexterity; it might not. I really can’t tell at this point.”

Unexpectedly David’s lip curled into a snarl, anger quickly replacing the look of shock in his eyes. “That’s all you could do?!” he shouted. “You never heard him play; you don’t even know what it _means_ to say he might lose that.” David remembered the light in Neal’s eyes when he played, his body belonging beside a guitar like a third arm. It would kill him if he lost even a fraction of that. “I’m sick and fucking tired of hearing doctors say they’ve done all they could--”

Michael didn’t notice the strength in David’s voice break; didn’t think he spoke of other doctors, a continent away, who doled out their diagnoses like death warrants with hapless shrugs. All he saw was an angry soldier who by all rights should have been shipped home months ago.

“You know what I’m tired of?” he spat right back, the fire in his voice bringing out a thick Australian accent. “I’m tired of bandaging up boys like him, like you, that should’ve never been here in the first place. Or sending them home in body bags.” He inched closer to David, crowding into his space; making this tirade personal. “I told you both not to reenlist. You were pushing your luck for only a damn month back home. You could have been home for good by now; instead you’re here,” Johns pointed towards the gurney, a blood-stained hand accusing them both. “And he’s there.”

David squared his jaw and tried to hold onto his anger but it deflated quickly against Michael’s truths. “And don’t put your shit on me,” Michael warned darkly, snapping the bloody medical gloves off his hands. “It’s only because of my surgery that your mate there still has a hand.”

With one final look towards Neal, Johns turned to stomp off. “Where do you think you’re going?” David asked.

“I have other patients,” Johns called over his shoulder, the bite still evident in his tone. “Don’t you know...there’s a war going on.”

Michael regretted leaving as he did, the anger and his own pride overpowering the need to help a friend. He kept walking, though he felt the pang of guilt when David’s voice called back after him, resentful and reactionary and more than a little hurt.

“Alright, fine!” David shouted after him. He would have ran after the doctor then, but he certainly didn’t need the trouble it’d cause if he were kicked out of the hospital. “Make me tell him fucking everything!”

But the fight eased out of David’s nerves, one breath completely deflating him. There was no point in arguing with the doctor’s receding frame. He looked to his right, at the figure on the gurney, slowly stirring out of his anesthesia. David took a deep breath, willing his hands to stop shaking and his eyes to stay dry. He had to ready himself for a whole new struggle.

***

Neal really hoped someone got the number of that truck that rolled into him. At least that was what it felt like, his eyes blinking into consciousness in the bright, noisy open halls of the hospital. His eyesight fuzzy at first, he could barely discern light from shadow, his limbs feeling too heavy to move, his head awash with discomfort. A truck was the only explanation for this kind of pain, one of the shiny big rigs that dominated the interstate, probably did quite a number on his Charger, too. But he couldn’t remember ever driving onto the road...

His brain stopped trying to focus on recollections that weren’t there when he realized exactly where he was, and what had landed him there. The overgrown rice fields...the sudden ambush of his unit. That searing, spiking pain in his hand... Neal groaned, his eyes closing again, the memory of it adding to the throbbing pain he was already feeling. It had to have been a bullet, he realized, remembering going down hard onto the ground, and nothing more. How the fuck he reached the inside of a hospital, he had no idea.

Now, with a better understanding of where he was and what had transpired, he wondered if anyone got the number of that VietCong motherfucker who hit him instead.

When he felt confident enough to open his eyes once more, hoping to no avail that the pain of the lights overhead would subside, Neal spied a head-shaped shadow in his view, blurry at first, but soon focusing into something quite familiar. “Dave...” he whispered, his throat unpleasantly dry. If there ever were a time Neal was actually thankful that David Cook latched onto him as his best friend, this was it.

A relieved smile lit over David’s features, stretching over a face marked with worry. “You’re awake,” he said, and Neal groaned in response; as awake as could’ve been expected. “Had me going for a while there. Should’ve known it’d take more than a BB gun to take you out for the count.”

Awkwardly David reached over from the side of the gurney to lightly punch Neal in the shoulder--a gesture of camaraderie in the most macho sense of the word, but the cautious way he did it made Neal wonder why his friend was being so damn delicate. He tried to give him the same greeting in return, but his arms still felt so heavy at his sides, fatigue still deep in his bones. Sensing what Neal was attempting to do, David held out his hand and stopped him, pressing firmly on Neal’s shoulder, shaking his head.

“You’ll want to wait a while before you try that,” David warned, his teeth self-consciously digging into his lower lip. He held Neal’s gaze as best he could, trying to keep Neal’s eyes, and thoughts, away from any pain he might be feeling, or the reasons for it. He wanted to use Neal’s haziness from the operation to his advantage; if he talked to him later, when the anesthesia wore off, Neal might be a bit more concerned about why he couldn’t feel his fingers.

Too weak to protest, Neal simply nodded slowly; but even the slight movement of his head sent his brain into a tailspin, vision blurring once more. He closed his eyes tightly and opened them again, willing the drowsy confusion away. When David came into focus again Neal thought he succeeded, not even realizing that he was attempting to curl both hands into fists, and only managed to complete one.

Very slowly his eyes scanned what he could see of David, moving his head only enough to keep his mind’s protests at bay. But for the darkness in David’s eyes he looked unchanged from that morning, boisterous and brash, trying to enliven everyone’s spirits while trudging through their mission. He was standing, and to Neal at that moment it was a feat in itself; his hands gripped firm and true on the railing of the gurney, his arms and chest free of bandages, all fingers accounted for. The blood on the front of his uniform looked like a flesh wound at worst--it took him half an hour to figure out it wasn’t David’s blood at all. It didn’t appear that David had a scratch on him; no one would have ever guessed they had both been in that same rice field that morning, under the same heavy fire.

“You...” he attempted, his throat still dry and aching. David leaned in closer, mindful of the noise and Neal’s discomfort, until his ear was nearly in front of Neal’s face. With a flare of amusement Neal spoke as loud as he could muster directly into David’s eardrum, suddenly finding his throat wasn’t as sore as to pass up this kind of opportunity. “You lucky bastard.”

Neal’s face broke out into a grin as wide as the pain would allow; David quickly followed suit, his eyes gleaming, mouth open in the first full laugh he’d had all day. “You’re fuckin’ telling me,” David chuckled, straightening up to give Neal more space. He was more alert than either of them expected. But the smile soon faded into something false, a fake cover for the real emotions David was feeling. “Maybe someone out there’s decided the Cooks have enough shit on their hands right now.”

Nodding as best he could, Neal grew sympathetic, one of the few soldiers in all Vietnam who knew of the family turmoil David dealt with back home. “How is he...?” he began, but David held up his hand, quickly cutting him off.

“You’re in a hospital bed.” Neal snorted--as if anyone had to remind him--but the effort left him wincing. “We’re not turning this into a conversation about me.”

Smiling weakly, Neal settled down, trying to give as much comfort to his body as a gurney could give him. “Guess my luck ran out,” he said, feigning a laugh. He hoped David would pick up on the dark humor, at least give him a laugh for pity’s sake, but he stayed silent, his face unflinching, his stare cold. Whatever had happened in that field after he fell unconscious, Neal surmised, was no laughing matter.

He swallowed a gulp of air, readying himself for it, before he said to David, his voice barely above a whisper. “Who else’s luck ran out?”

***

>   
> __
> 
> _June 14, 1969_
> 
> _Neal, this letter’s going directly to you. Not to David, not to anybody else; you, because I know you’re there and you’ll answer it. I know it’s not going to get sent back with that big, scary red “DECEASED” stamp on the envelope. Even though I haven’t heard one damn word from you yet, there’s something in my gut--yeah, my gut, Neal, I’ve been resorted to using that feeling I get when I eat too many cheeseburgers--that tells me you’re not dead. There hasn’t been one word around town about you getting wounded, much less getting yourself killed, and believe me, I’ve been paying attention. Since I haven’t heard anything about you dying, I’ve no choice but to assume you’re alive._
> 
> _Because Bryan Jewett is dead, and I’ve sure as hell heard about that, so you’ve got to be alive._
> 
> _His parents got the official letter the same day David wrote to me: all official-like, hand-typed, even embossed with some ugly golden military seal on the front. Real signatures and everything. Guess the army thinks they owe it to the dead guy’s family to write up about his death real nice, make it out like Uncle Sam actually cares the poor guy’s dead. I only saw the letter, didn’t get a chance to read it, but I’m pretty damn sure I knew more about the truth behind that ambush than the government ever told the Jewetts._
> 
> _Once that letter got sent the news spread like wildfire in the town, by the afternoon everyone heard about it. They all talked in whispers and hushed tones, to keep their gossip polite of course, but you knew the topic of conversation all the same. It’s funny how the people who knew him least end up being the ones who talk the most. That Bryan Jewett, I’d hear just walking to the damn diner, always a good Tulsa boy, so brave, so patriotic. Re-enlisted for democracy, one small sacrifice for one great country. He left here just a kid, but he died a hero._
> 
> _Fuck ‘em all. They don’t know shit about Bryan._
> 
> _There’ve been soldiers out of Tulsa before that left and never came back, or were shipped home in a box, you know that well enough; but for some reason the town’s really rallied behind Bryan, made him into some kind of...symbol for this war, for all they’ve sacrificed. (I want to scream at them, they don’t even know what it is to sacrifice, they haven’t even been there.) Even the newspaper wrote up an article about him, glossing over the ambush and how he died. They don’t mention that you were wounded in the battle, too; actually, they don’t mention you were there at all._
> 
> _Do all soldiers lose who they were once they die, Neal? Are their bodies sent back along with a whole new history to feed to the public, stretching the truth so far into the next county it barely even feels like the guy you knew? Have the soldiers over in Vietnam also already forgotten the real Bryan Jewett, too?_
> 
> _And the funeral...holy shit, man. Never realized so much bullshit could fit into Oaklawn Cemetery before. Tons of flowers, flags...even a military gun salute, and if that didn’t scare people off the highway, nothing would. Hundreds of people came out from all over the place to attend, people who never knew Bryan when he was alive; said they just came to pay respects to a soldier, but you know they just wanted to see the damn fireworks of the whole thing. All of it felt so formal, and so fake...I knew we were burying someone but it didn’t feel like it should have been Bryan._
> 
> _The only thing I could remember was watching Bryan’s mother breaking down crying when they lowered the coffin into the ground. That...that was what mattered that day, or even should have mattered. Not a country losing its soldier, a town losing a hero, any of the rest of that bullshit they’re spewing...but a mother having to lose her son._
> 
> _We got together after the funeral--what’s left of the group, that is, barely enough guys to fill up a pickup truck--down at the Indian trading store, where they don’t give a shit if teenagers sit around their parking lot and drink till it’s dark. And that’s exactly what we did, though no one was there to laugh or tell jokes or dick around. I think they knew that’s what we were there for, so they left us alone in the parking lot all the same. We just stood there, Nick leaning on the back of his truck, passing back the bottle every now and again to Josh in the bay, our eyes to the ground, not saying a word._
> 
> _No one knew what exactly to say, at that point._
> 
> _It wasn’t just something we saw on the news anymore; we couldn’t just pretend Bryan, or you for that matter, had gone away on vacation or some shit. Bryan was one of us; he used to sit right in that parking lot, pull on the same liquor bottle and joke, laugh. There definitely wasn’t any more joking, no big stories of how anyone escaped the draft, fooled the ol’ army so they could stay home and away from trouble. Nick and Josh, and all of them, they couldn’t say with a laugh and a toast that they dodged the bullet, because Bryan didn’t escape, and he didn’t dodge it._
> 
> _Then they all looked at me, sad, uncertain eyes under a gray sky, all still done up in our black suits and combed hair. ‘Cause they knew I still had to face it. In a few months it’ll be my turn to go._
> 
> _Your absence became all too apparent, and I told them about the letter David had sent me, what he said about you. Everyone sends good wishes to you, man, to get better and get the fuck home already. Phil says he can’t wait to hear any new songs you’ve got for us to hear; Nick says he just misses drinking with you. No one said it, no one needed to, it was all over their faces in that parking lot: no one wants to have to wear these suits again for your funeral._
> 
> _And just in case you didn’t already get it, I’m sending good wishes to you, too. Didn’t think I’d actually have to say it, I mean, you still owe me five bucks from the Blue Dome and as much as I’d like this fine looking guitar to be mine and mine alone, I think it rightfully deserves to go back to you. But I want to say it, all the same. Everyone’s pulling for you here, we hope we get to see you safe and sound and home in no time. Especially me; fuck, Neal, do I want to know you’re okay, more than anything. More than I’m even willing to admit in this letter._
> 
> _Let me know how the surgery went. David’s as chatty in letters as you say he is in person, he couldn’t wait to send out that letter to me and I have no idea what the surgery was even for, let alone if it went off well. Tell me if you’re doing okay, if you need anything; I can send you things, you know that, don’t even worry about the cost. Or maybe this is even your lucky break: I hear tons of stories with the SDS, soldiers who get one small injury and the army decides they’re no longer fit to fight. Maybe this is what sends you home. Have you heard anything about that? Fuck, for how much they talk about all the ways to get out of combat in SDS meetings, they must never stop talking about it in country._
> 
> _Sorry, my head’s all over the place, and I’m puking it all up in this letter. I don’t even know what to write at this point--how’s the surgery, the hand...fuck, everything. I don’t know what to ask because there’s so little I already know. If it’s about you being hurt, Neal, I want to know all you can tell me. But sometimes--and I’d only admit this to you--I’m scared to even know the answers. Fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t, but I just feel there’s this...weight on my chest, like a giant dog is standing right there, and it won’t lift up no matter what until I see you again._
> 
> _Maybe it’s selfish of me to ask this of you, when I know you’re wounded, and you’re probably not in any kind of mood to entertain your penpal. But fuck it, call me a selfish prick, I don’t care; I need to hear this from you. I need to hear anything from you, see your handwriting, know they’re your words. I can’t stand this silence, holding my breath for fear of what I don’t know. Even if you have to dictate the whole fucking letter to David; make that fucker work for his friendship. Because the songs, the music...you. You matter to me._
> 
> _You once wrote to me that you thought of me like family; that I counted. Well, right back atcha, buddy._
> 
> _Please write me back, however much you want to tell me, it’s fine. I just need to hear something from you._
> 
> _I’ll be here when you need me. I promise._
> 
> _Andy  
> _   
> 


	24. Chapter 24

The worst part had been not feeling his fingers. The thick, heavy cast around Neal’s left hand had to stay in place for at least a few days; its weight made him barely able to lift his arm, though there wasn’t a damn thing he could do once he actually could lift it. It was his fingers that worried him the most: wrapped in the cast like a plaster mitten, Neal couldn’t tell if his will and his silent pleas were at all successful in moving the digits, frozen in their position. He could barely tell if he’d even feel it if they did. On the second day, once the drugs that made Neal’s head feel like it was made of cotton wore off, he banged the cast against the railing of his bed in a fit of frustration, desperate to feel pain, feel _anything_ in those fingers. Doctor Johns railed him for it, warning Neal that he saved that hand--and he could spitefully take it away.

But empty threats veiled the doctor’s genuine concern that Neal would forcibly remove the cast before he properly healed. Johns had the hard plaster removed within three days, replaced by a more flexible, cloth bandage to protect the palm, under the strict orders that Neal not try to punch any brick walls in the near future.

The first rush of air against Neal’s free fingers was his own breath of relief, feeling the thriving pulse of blood traveling normally again to the digits. But when he tried to flex his fingers, curling them in towards his palm, five stabbing pains sliced at his nerves, shooting up his arm, causing him to drop it like dead weight. Johns noticed the shocked grimace on Neal’s face, the grit of his teeth as he held back the yelp, and marked it on the soldier’s health chart; but he quickly stepped away without a word, knowing to stay clear of the range of Neal’s good right hook.

David was there to tell him it was, at the very least, a positive sign: if it hurt like a motherfucker even just to move the hand, then there was still hope. At least Neal could still feel it.

He was thankful for David’s presence in the hospital, though the soldier had made it clear from the start he was going to be there, invited or not. Along with week-old letters from family and half-hearted tales of the front, David also brought encouragement, an optimistic smile and the right balance of jokes to help dull the pain in Neal’s arm, but not too many to wear out his welcome. David always put on a grin when he visited Neal, keeping the conversations as light as he could, though he often had to change the topic to football or the on-duty nurse’s chest to do so. Between the war their unit, still in mourning, had returned to, Neal’s ass in a hospital bed, and David’s own personal woes, there wasn’t any light to be found in talk of the real world.

Neal knew that grin was hiding something darker, how it plastered on the same way every morning like a woman putting on her face in the powder room. But he kept quiet about it, knowing that if David wanted to spill his guts over it, he’d spill. There were times when a best friend needed to be honest, up front about everything in his life; and there were times when the best course of action was to lie.

The unit had a new commander, David told him, a quick and quiet replacement for Bryan, the higher officers acting as if he merely was transferred, or finally went home. He was a slick, brooding man from New York named Kulchinsky. David said that out of respect for Bryan he wasn’t looking to get too attached to this one, but the obvious tell on his face and Neal’s knowledge of his nature revealed he already was. David told him the C.O.’s first name but Neal didn’t bother to remember it; he’d rather never remember another officer’s name for the rest of his life.

But the most vital reason David visited the soldier’s bedside was to deliver Neal his letters, gladly taking up the role of the postman again to connect his wounded friend with loved ones back home. With military mail routes overtaxed with letters both homebound and abroad, it took nearly a week before any new mail arrived, leaving Neal with little to do except flirt with the nurses for sport and distract David from his duties in the field. Every few hours Doctor Johns arrived with a dressing changed, a vital checked, new drugs administered. He now reserved his bedside manner, he said through gritted teeth, for soldiers who actually listened to it, and Neal could tell from the icy stares between Johns and David that something had gone sour between them.

The first letters he dreaded came from his parents, the government finally seeing it fit to notify them that their son, under Uncle Sam’s great care, nearly died in a foreign forgotten rice field. His mother’s note was all tears and worry, the very things he wished he could keep from her mind forever; his father’s ranged from angry to somber, and it seemed their son’s welfare was the only thing they agreed upon in a decade. He flexed and tensed the fingers on his left hand tentatively, feeling the sting of the unused tendons but knowing they were in repair. He’d write to them once he had the strength back in his hand, he vowed, still a week away from being close to healing.

Then he found Andy’s letter, the handwriting so familiar to his eyes, and Neal knew he couldn’t wait a week to respond.

Taking a suggestion from Andy himself, Neal enlisted the help of his eager postmaster, who was relieved to get another few hours away from the reality of base camp. While it was the only alternative short of David miraculously finding another tape recorder to steal, neither soldier thought the situation was ideal. Neal mumbled when he talked, David complained, and constantly edited and corrected himself while dictating; he had scratched out Neal’s revised first line so many times he needed a new sheet of paper. And Neal was finding it hard to censor himself, caught between what he wanted to say to Andy and what he would choose to let David know.

But the truth--the one Neal only allowed himself to think in the darkest hours of the night, away from David and the doctors, when all her heard were the agonizing screams of the dying around him--was that he wasn’t sure what he would choose to let Andy know, either.

He restricted himself, revealing only one word to David from the twenty in his mind, holding the rest within, keeping them from the world. He muttered into his third paragraph, methodically flexing the muscles in his hand and awaiting the day he no longer had to send letters through a middleman, when David stopped abruptly, slamming the papers down onto Neal’s bedside, effectively resigning.

“Th’ fuck, Cook!?” Neal started from the papers and pen thrown down into his lap. “You’re dealing with the wounded here, you know.”

David seemed unaffected by Neal’s cursing, a scowl still on his face. “I’m not writing this,” he said resolutely, folding his arms in front of his chest.

Neal was stricken. “You said you’d help,” he downplayed the amount of “help” David was providing with his offer, the healthy soldier all but putting the words into his mouth. And now it seemed he wanted to do that, too.

“Yeah, I did,” David conceded, though his stern expression did not change. “I didn’t say I’d _lie_ for you.”

With a roll of his eyes Neal instinctively denied it, but the tightening of his free hand against the bed’s railing told a different story. “I’m not--” he began, but David cut him off. He hadn’t been taking too kindly to bullshit lately, Neal noticed, though he often gave the injured man a pass.

“‘I’m doing fine, Andy,’” he quoted Neal’s dictated words, but with a cynical bite the original lines hadn’t contained. “‘No need to worry. Cook just _overreacted_ in his letter.’”

Stubbornly setting his jaw, Neal looked up at David with a challenging quirk of his brow. He could tell David wanted a response from him, some great realization that he spoke the golden truth, but Neal, steadfast, wouldn’t give it away.

But Neal underestimated the will of David Cook, especially when it had to deal with his friends--whether fighting for them, or brashly pointing out when one of them was being an asshole. “You’re not ‘fine!’” he spat out, his gaze flickering momentarily on the bandages around Neal’s arm.

It quickly deflated Neal’s obstinacy, and he let out a deep sigh before he muttered, “You don’t haveta fuckin’ tell me.”

“No,” David said, pointing to the letter. “But you have to tell him.”

Neal looked down at the letter in his lap, barely started, only a few words on the page where he wanted to write a million. David’s foreign handwriting made it feel all so detached, seeing the words he wanted to give to Andy written by someone else. Even Andy’s name at the head of the page, in David’s politely neat hand instead of his messy, familiar one, felt so unreal. How could he say what he truly wanted to Andy, when they weren’t even _his_ words anymore?

“I don’t have to tell him shit,” he said with a sneer.

His answer perplexed David, whose brow crinkled in confusion. He had seen the loyalty Neal had for his best friend, refusing to ever let David share that distinction, even just as a wartime substitute. With the closeness Neal shared with Andy in their letters, David thought he’d want to share this, too. “You don’t think he deserves to hear the truth from you?” he asked. “Or not being lied to, at least.”

All he received in response was a noncommittal shrug, Neal’s eyes still trained on the letter. “He’d just freak out about it,” was Neal’s feeble excuse, recalling the first time he had been injured in the field, the string of worried curses that came from Andy’s pen. And that happened back when they were just friends; best friends, but with only one short kiss between them. Neal wasn’t sure what to call their status now, but after his month on free leave, still remembering how Andy’s skin felt against his, it was certainly more than mere friends.

“And with good reason.” David tried to bite his tongue, hold in the remarks that would only push Neal farther away, no matter how true they may have been. But resentful bile rose in his throat when he watched Neal’s dispassionate face, saw how easily he rationalized lying about his wounds. Just thinking about his own loved ones keeping dire news from him, because he might not be able to handle it, set David on edge.

He leaned down, unapologetically getting into Neal’s face, leaving barely any space between them for the air, let alone any lies Neal wanted to bring up. “He’s got to know. Not just because he’s your friend, but your partner.” Neal’s eyes snapped up alarmingly, quickly searching David’s face for any hidden meaning in the word, any hint they were discovered; but nothing was there except David’s concern.

“I know it’s your songs, your music...but it’s not just yours, it’s his, too.” If only one thing tied the three of those men together, even without all of them meeting face to face, it was music. If Andy was anything like David and had even a fraction of Neal’s dedication to their craft, then David had a grasp of how much their success would mean to him. “He’s hitting the pavement, busting his ass to get you guys big when you go home. Don’t you think he should know if that’s not gonna happen anymore?”

His eyes glanced down again at Neal’s wounded hand, remembering what Doctor Johns had told him, how nerve damage might affect everything Neal did with his left hand--everything. The music Neal pulled from those fingers, using even the borrowed strings of David’s guitar, had been hauntingly beautiful, with more mastery and soul than David had ever heard. If he made his audience feel the music so acutely, David thought, he had no idea the impact it had on Neal himself. But if the bullet in his hand took all that away...

David hoped Neal would understand the sensitive situation he was now in. He expected something more along the lines of a stubborn snort and avoidance of the topic, something Neal was notorious for. But what he hadn’t planned for at all was Neal’s lips curling into a snarl, his blue eyes quickly flashing in anger.

“You saying you think I can’t play?!” burst out Neal, his temperature racing to an angry heat. Helping Neal was one thing, making assumptions about his friendship was another, but _no one_ questioned Neal’s musical ability. David put a notion into Neal’s head he didn’t even want to think was possible. If he came home after all this hell, his body broken and his will shattered, and he couldn’t even play a guitar-- _his_ guitar, the one he trusted Andy to care for, keep safe until it was in Neal’s hands again...

If he couldn’t play guitar anymore, then he shouldn’t even bother to come home.

The sudden rush of fear bubbled up to the surface, breaking away from his body in angry, panicked bursts. “I can play,” he insisted, though he hadn’t hadn’t held a guitar since Tulsa. “And I will play. Can probably still fuckin’ play better than you, even with this.”

He held up his wounded arm, his tattooed fingers peeking through the bandages. Gritting his teeth against the pain Neal curled those fingers into a fist, mustering up a threatening glare at David. Both Neal and David tried to pretend they hadn’t seen Neal’s hand tremble from the effort. Neal, with more to lose, was better with the denial.

Shaking his head, David explained, “But the doc said--”

“Fuck what the doc said,” Neal cut him off quickly, raising his voice, pushing himself upright on the hospital bed. It was his turn to get into David’s face. “He doesn’t know me.” With his breath coming in angry pants and his lips spitting venom, Neal sneered, finding a sick satisfaction in watching David recoil in response. “You don’t fuckin’ know me.”

Reeling, David stepped back as if he had been struck by that fist at Neal’s side. He thought he knew Neal Tiemann well enough to trust his life to him in the field, call him his best friend. But if he hadn’t guessed his suggestion would push Neal to this panicked state, back him into a corner on the one thing he’d die before he lost...then perhaps David didn’t know him as well as he thought.

He took a deep breath, Neal’s menacing stare sobering him, daring him to step past his boundaries again. “You should tell him,” he said candidly, bringing the conversation back to the unfinished letter to Andy in Neal’s lap. All the fight was drained from his voice, and now he only hoped a miracle would let Neal see the clarity of the situation. “He cares about you, it’s obvious. Don’t keep him in the dark about this.”

For a brief moment something changed in Neal’s face, his stubborn scowl softening at the observation that Andy really did care. But in the next moment it was gone, any change of heart Neal may have had gone with the turn of the wind. “I’ll decide what I tell him,” he said defiantly. The panicked anger in his voice was gone, replaced with an eerie calm that unsettled David more than the rage. “And I’m fine.”

David stood his ground. “Then I’m not writing that letter for you.”

Disaffected, Neal shrugged, refusing to let David break his resolve. He had lived twenty fucking years of his life without knowing David Cook just fine; he could make due another day without the other soldier’s generosity. “I’ll just do it myself,” he said.

“But your hand...” David began, already knowing the argument was in vain. If Neal had convinced himself he was fine--despite the pain David saw on his face every day, despite the attempts and failures to use his left hand like he used to--nothing anyone could say would tell him otherwise.

Just as he suspected, Neal had already tuned him out, letting the droning buzz of the hospital drown out David’s protests. Placing the discarded pen in his left hand, Neal tried to curve his fingers around the small object to write, stubbornly ignoring his brain’s silent screams of pain. But the bandages around his palm kept the fingers too stiffly separated to hold the pen as delicately as letter writing required. It fell back to his lap, ineffective and powerless.

Neal tried again a few times, placing the pen in his palm, curling his fingers and sliding the pen between them, but each time it dropped, the letter unwritten. David was about to step in again, recanting his refusal to help if Neal only compromised, his frustration so visible. But Neal snorted and sneered, ignoring the silent offer, not even bringing his eyes up to watch a defeated David turn and walk away.

He was about to give up himself, completely at the mercy of a stupid plastic BIC pen, staring down at the two hands in his lap, one undamaged and whole, the other bandaged and broken. With a new wave of determination he held the pen in his right hand, settling it uncomfortably between his fingers. He taught himself to play guitar right-handed; and he taught himself, long ago, to write. If he could pick and strum with his right hand, why not form letters and words?

In the unnatural fluorescent light of the field hospital, abandoned by his one remaining friend in the country, Neal spent the rest of the day and the bulk of the next scribbling lies on a sheet of paper to Andy, painstakingly teaching his right hand how to write.

***

“We need to start thinking seriously here; no more minor league protests. We need blood for blood!”

The speaker’s fist slammed down, making the table shake with tremors even at the far end, causing Andy’s pen to skitter and skip on the page. It traced an erratic blue line of ink from the lyrics he had been scribbling on the paper, his mind focused on the melody in his head rather than the shouting match at the head of the foldout table.

>   
> _I just want things to stay the same_   
> _They probably will the more I wait_   
> _But if we don’t talk I’m gonna fall away from you..._   
> 

The table shook again, this time from a different angle--another speaker, another voice looking to use his fist to be heard. “I’ve heard news from the chapters down in Dallas: they’re breaking ranks, making sure they’re heard, and heard now. We can’t wait any longer.”

“But wait for what?” Another voice added to the conversation, this time closer to Andy, a voice so familiar he perked his head up out of friendly respect. Monty drummed a pen on the table in slow, rhythmic beats, a calming metronome against the erratic beating of other members’ fists. “We’ve been doin’ it the way we’ve always been doin’ it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, boys.”

Andy smiled to himself as he listened to Monty’s argument, the easygoing teacher always helpful with words of advice and encouragement, even if they weren’t appropriate for a situation. He had increasingly become the voice of reason at their SDS meetings, the calmer heads at the university giving way to radical, bitterly angry newcomers who saw anyone over the age of twenty-five as a threat.

The speaker at the head of the table--young, with thick-rimmed glasses and an equally thick Midwestern accent--agreed with Monty, but only so far. “But no one built Rome on a petition,” he reminded the rest of the group, two dozen or so nodding heads and assenting grumbles around the table. The attendance in meetings had changed sharply since the start of the year, from a few radical stragglers and university students looking for free refreshments, to a sizable and significant chapter of the SDS, rivaling even the less vocal contingent in Oklahoma City. With more and more youths Andy’s age being sent off to a war with no foreseeable end, it was clear his generation was seeking a change.

But the methods introduced by Monty’s generation weren’t bringing that change fast enough. “We need results now,” the rest of the group agreed. “Take over city halls--hell, take over whole cities. Playing by their rules is keeping us from our goal.”

Though the finger wasn’t pointed directly at Monty, the sentiment was all the same. Andy frowned and went back to writing, the conversation already three steps past what he could ever attempt to control. When he had returned from his trip to New York City, Andy was received with welcome arms to the inner circle of Tulsa’s SDS, only to be ousted again once the organization’s members discovered he hadn’t done a lick of political networking with the powerful New York chapter. An opportunity wasted, they said under their breaths, and Andy was relegated to the lonely end of the discussion table, oftentimes leaving him alone in his own thoughts.

But falling out of favor in the group never stopped Monty from speaking his mind. “And what is the goal, anymore?” he asked; out of the corner of Andy’s eye he watched Monty’s hands clench into fists atop the table. “You can’t stop violence with more violence. Bells and whistles will get you attention, but the only real way to change is through the law.”

The rest of the group seemed unfazed by the case Monty was pleading: it was a different outlook, a different generation, and though only a dozen or so years separated Monty from the table of youths, they had learned very early in their adolescence to tune out anyone pushing thirty.

“Violence,” said the original speaker, his voice even and grave, an expression so serious on his face no one dared to question further. “Is all the world ever seems to hear.”

He continued on, fielding questions and quickly squashing dissent from others, as Monty slumped back in his chair, his head propped up on an elbow, and Andy, his jaw clenched and his eyes down, kept writing.

The SDS meeting went on for another hour before they disbanded for the night, the free pizza already long gone and still nothing accomplished. The night ended just as it had been ending for weeks now, the brainstorming of plans and ideas for the organization devolving into shouting matches, the group barely able to advocate peace within its own ranks.

Let alone championing civil rights and ending the war; the great activists of Andy’s generation couldn’t even clean up after themselves. Andy stayed long after the meeting, as he did every meeting, to help throw away empty pizza boxes and return the room back to a college lounge, his thoughts running cynical currents through his mind. Though his loyalty to Monty kept him in the teacher’s corner during meetings, Andy didn’t know which side he fell upon in the argument. The progress made from peaceful protests and working inside of the law had been painfully slow, and it had cost the country’s young men dearly. But he had also seen the damage done by protests that went too far--he could still remember the heat of that flaming bra atop his head--and he feared how badly that path could turn.

Andy didn’t know what the solution was, but something had to happen, and soon. If the state of Tulsa’s ragtag group was any indication, the whole of the SDS, every anti-war chapter in the country, must have been in tumult. He felt like a mere passenger in the movement’s speeding locomotive, teetering off the tracks and careening towards a crash.

With a sudden grimace, Andy pitched an empty red plastic cup towards the garbage roughly, his emotion getting the better of him. Everything seemed to be going to shit lately; everything was falling apart and he couldn’t fix it.

The cup hurtled through the air, across the room and aiming straight for the garbage can, until it lost its momentum and sank to the ground eighteen inches short of its goal. Frowning, Andy let out a deflated sigh, his head dropping into his hands. Even _that_ couldn’t go his way.

“Guess that sports scholarship is out of the picture,” said a voice above him, accent thick, tone light. “But you’re tennis anyway, ain’tya?”

When Andy looked up a befuddled Monty was scratching his balding scalp, puzzled about more than just the teenager’s varsity sport of choice. It was tough for him not to crack a wry smirk, his anger ebbing. “I’m shit at tennis, too,” he admitted.

That garnered a laugh from Monty as he swept stray pizza crumbs off of a desk. Andy didn’t know if he lingered afterwards so Monty wouldn’t have to clean up after the college kids all alone, or if Monty stayed late so Andy would have a reliable ride home; either way, he thought, they both appreciated the company. “Guess you’ll just have to get in on your smarts, eh?” Monty said, chuckling.

But the chuckling ebbed when Andy didn’t follow suit; he turned around to see Andy slouching in his chair, lip curled up into a cynical sneer. “Yeah, college,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “Let me enroll right away, so I can be one of these hypocrites in the meeting.” He waved his hand towards the empty seats, once filled with the members of the SDS about whom Andy had become so jaded. “They all say they want results, but it takes them weeks to even decide how to get them. We’re not being heard, either way. And while we’re bickering over this...” he took a deep sigh, remembering the silent helplessness that invaded his group of friends after Bryan’s funeral. “...people are getting killed.”

A sad smile crossed Monty’s face, and he shrugged, arms folded in front of his chest. “That’s bureaucracy for you,” he said, knowing Andy was getting an education on the topic in ways his classroom could never provide.

“Neal went to college.” Monty came to expect the segues into Andy’s paths of thought, any topic from his latest song to strawberry ice cream leading in some way back to Neal. “Went for music theory. He’s a genius at it; too bad he had to take everything else, too. After a year he dropped out before they could kick him out. Seems neither one of us is cut out for it, huh.” He gave a noncommittal shrug, his gaze suddenly dropping to the floor, away from the fallen party cup. “‘Course, that’s when the army got him.”

Monty watched Andy slouch back in his seat, his jaw clenched, kicking viciously at a stray napkin on the floor. He opened his mouth to ask how Neal was doing, an instinct as natural for Andy to answer as walking; but the arms crossed in front of Andy’s chest and the surly snarl on his lips told Monty the boy was in no mood to talk.

“Y’know,” he said, raising an eyebrow as Andy restlessly rose from his seat, his hands balled into fists he didn’t know where or how to use. “Most folks gettin’ this kind of news don’t look like they’re about to overturn a table.” He remembered the first time Andy received such a letter from Neal, months ago, when his first visit to an SDS meeting was interrupted by sorrow. Andy’s reaction had been different back then, a shy teen curving in on himself, scared to face the reality of his best friend’s injuries. But now he fought back, lashing out at anything that would take the punishment, pressing out against the walls of his world that were threatening to collapse. There was another time Monty had seen Andy fuming with anger--when he vaulted over a desk in his history class and straight into a brawl with half of the baseball team.

Sighing deeply, Andy loosened one of the fists to run a hand through his hair, the memory of Neal’s fingers tugging through his short hair so sharp it shocked his fingers. Anger quickly melted into longing, and, with the length of their history stretching in his mind in an instant, back to anger. “Me and Neal aren’t ‘most folks,’” he muttered under his breath, but immediately regretted his resentful tone. It was uncalled for to be angry with Monty, he had been nothing but kind to Andy, transforming from a distant teacher to an engaging mentor--even a friend. And he shouldn’t have forced out his anger at the SDS: though their methods weren’t crystal clear, their intentions were, and for better or worse, they were all aiming for the same goal. The only thing he could find to be angry with was...

“It’s Neal,” he confessed, leaning both hands on the meeting table as if standing upright were suddenly a huge burden. Everything seemed to feel strenuous now, the least of all talking about Neal. “He keeps sending me letters.”

“Isn’t that...what you boys do?” Monty asked skeptically.

With a roll of his eyes Andy explained how this had suddenly become different, how the small, yet enlivening letters they had sent to one another became farcical routine, and the very thing Neal had never wanted between them. “He keeps telling me nothing’s wrong, he’s not as bad off as it sounds,” he said. The letter was burning a hole in the back pocket of his jeans--he always kept one with him now, ever since David’s came in Neal’s place, and counting the days felt like cinderblocks on his chest--but he didn’t show it to Monty, too embarrassed for the both of them. “His letters are barely legible. If he’s not writing with his right hand, then the left one’s got to be completely fucked.”

He wouldn’t let his voice break on the last sentence; Andy didn’t want to think of the implications of Neal’s damaged hand, how David focused so desperately on its injuries in his letter, and Neal conspicuously ignored it in his. The hands he remembered falling through his hair, running along his body, were more important, even more beautiful when holding a guitar.

But there was one thing he knew for certain; when he said it aloud a chill ran down his spine, making him shudder in spite of himself. “He’s lying to me,” Andy said in a quiet voice. “Even though we said we wouldn’t.”

“I know how it is,” Monty sympathized, but not with Andy’s position. “It’s rough, trying to explain what’s going on out there to people back home. He probably just doesn’t want you to worry.”

Andy let out a tired, sardonic laugh, the taste as bitter in his mouth as the remnants of stale pizza. “I’ve already worried,” he said, his tone a little too strong, recalling the days he waited in silence, barely able to sleep or even breathe, his stomach churning with guilt and fear. “I’ve been scared out of my goddamn mind. And I can’t do anything about it.” But now that he knew Neal was alive--and, according to his dubious letters, doing peachy out in Vietnam--his fear was overshadowed by something else. “But worrying all the time, every day...it takes so much strength. I can’t be scared for him all the time. I’m burned out.”

Silence. Andy didn’t know how it’d feel to say those words until they spilled out, like a faucet tapped and pouring gushing water. Admitting his frustrations felt like relinquishing his connection to Neal, almost giving up Neal himself; but it wasn’t until he said it to Monty did he realize how stuck he felt in his own fear. Between Neal, the SDS, and this whole goddamned war, Andy was sick of everything staying in its miserable place. He needed something to happen.

Finally Monty spoke, his voice genuine and knowing but strong, forcing Andy out of his thoughts. “So you think gettin’ tee’ed off works better than being scared.” It wasn’t a question, wasn’t even Monty stating the obvious to Andy; though the smile never left his face, his eyes narrowed, seeing through Andy’s words.

Giving a weak smile, Andy reconciled. “Gets my mind off it, at least,” he said, and Monty was polite enough not to say he doubted that, too.

He looked around the meeting room, still in disarray and not getting any cleaner with the pair merely talking over it. “And what’d get my mind off getting ‘tee’ed off,’” Andy smiled wider, poking fun at Monty’s vernacular. “Would be to clean up this mess.”

They worked in relative quiet, apart from Monty’s faint off-tune whistling of a Supremes song as he cleaned, the process calming Andy’s temper to a mellow hum. The lounge was soon left as they had found it, the tables and chairs re-arranged, napkins and cups binned, and empty pizza boxes stacked and ready for the dumpster, with any stray slices finding a home in Andy and Monty’s stomachs.

But on the drive back into town, the windows down in Monty’s Buick Special to let in the breezy summer air, Andy answered his challenge. When they reached Andy’s doorstep, he thanked Monty for the ride and the hospitality, as always; then shook his head, as if pushing away a thought, a memory.

“No, it doesn’t.” He smiled, even chuckled, remembering the last time he gave his confessions in a car.

Monty looked at him skeptically, a furrowed brow his request to elaborate. “The cleaning. The meetings, even.” He was back in Neal’s basement again, whispering into a colorfully inked chest how he never wanted this to end. He was curled up in the Charger’s backseat, struck dumb and awed as Neal listened to him breathe, covering Andy’s heart with his hand. And he was back in the bus depot, standing in the shadows of a corridor as he watched Neal leave for the last time. “Even being angry. None of it helps. None of it gets my mind off the fear.”

When Andy finally went to bed that night, staring blankly at the ceiling, his own hand draped over his chest, his response to Neal’s letter written and re-written in messy drafts across his desk, he realized he didn’t know what he feared more. Losing Neal, or keeping his lies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics from The To Have Heroes song [Better Day](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tohaveheroes).


	25. Chapter 25

After their last confrontation, Neal observed he was seeing a lot less of David, the friend who used to almost live in the visitor’s waiting room of the field hospital, now only stopping by to hand over Neal’s letters or pick up ones Neal had written in his sloppy, untrained hand. The first few days Neal assumed he was just sore over their argument, and David was respectfully keeping his distance to cool off both their heads. But after a week of nothing but silent stares and poorly-disguised red, watery eyes, Neal considered that David’s coldness might have nothing to do with him, after all.

His imposed solitude gave Neal hours on end to himself, the hospital staff only visiting him when they needed his blood or examined his hand. His cast had been inspected and replaced countless times over by now, each time the layers of gauze and plaster getting thinner, peeling back like layers of an onion, dry and brittle as paper. It was now little more than a wristguard, with heavy padded gauze around Neal’s wounded palm; he could curve the fingers down effortlessly, practicing methodically each day to cradle the neck of an invisible guitar.

He would play again, he told himself; once he got back to Tulsa it would be like riding a bicycle, the sensations rushing back to his hands the moment he touched his guitar. Considering any less in his future made him panicked and out of breath. His brain simply wouldn’t let him entertain such an option.

Returning to that guitar and his music were some of the only thoughts that kept him sane in the hospital, caught in the soldier’s limbo of being too injured to return to combat, but not injured enough to die. He let the memory of their one show at the Flytrap fill his mind, that rush of adrenaline he felt coursing through his veins when he stepped on the stage, playing his songs, making his voice heard.

The rest of his time was spent writing, his wounded left hand still lacking the confidence to hold a pen, his right hand steadily taking its place. It would take Neal hours in a day to finish just one page, his handwriting slow, growing more legible with each day, but still rough and primitive, like a grade schooler on waxy tracing paper. He tried to send as many letters as he could, but for speed’s sake he cut nearly everyone from his list, keeping only the most essential addressees: his parents, who would probably simultaneously have heart attacks in different states if he stopped writing to them; and Andy, the only person he could have ever considered learning to write all over again for.

Keeping his stubborn promise, Neal hadn’t let slip to Andy anything about the doctor’s doubts on restoring his dexterity, his new, painstaking method of writing making him acutely aware of every word he placed on the page. And there was no point, he rationalized, in getting Andy worried over an injury that may just as well right itself in a few weeks’ time. He knew Andy all too well, and even with David’s warning had probably blown the wound out of proportion, imagining Neal’s arm shot clean off, clinging onto life in the middle of Vietnam. And while it was endearing to imagine his best friend back home worrying himself sick over Neal’s condition, he never wanted Andy to know how dire his situation actually had been, how it felt to have a bullet rip through your hand.

Neal sighed deeply and closed his eyes in grim acceptance every time he wondered if Andy would learn a similar painful lesson, when it was his turn in the draft, and Neal was the one in a house built of waiting and worrying.

So he kept the letters light, routinely reminding Andy that he was bored being virtually bound to a hospital bed, his right hand navigating around any topic too serious for his taste. Neal found himself poring over Andy’s words on his own evolution as a musician, almost feeling his excitement through the paper, preparing more business connections while devotedly honing his craft. The one pleasure Neal found during those weeks in the hospital lay within Andy’s letters, reading through the new songs sent straight from Andy’s guitar strings to Neal’s eyes. They were different from Neal’s musical sensibilities, Andy leaning heavily on soft, soulful piano melodies while Neal relied on impressive, powerful guitar; but the raw talent was all there, Neal would’ve had to have been blind not to see it.

While he could write for days to Andy on his music, sending back technical suggestions and glowing praise with each song, Neal was less than forthcoming with his own music. He burned the lie into Andy’s letters that he hadn’t found the time to write, claiming the constant noise and antiseptic smell of the field hospital drowned out the music in his head. But beneath those pages of letters written and received, hidden from the doctors and even David’s eyes, were songs Neal created in an almost fevered dream, dark chords and lyrics that cut at his veins deeper than any scalpel. They weren’t yet ready for public view, not even for technical scrutiny, though Neal had never considered Andy to be the public before, lumped in together, outside of Neal’s center of thought, with the rest of the world. That was the reason, he told himself, why he kept the songs hidden, even from the one man who swore to Neal he would always be there to listen.

Andy wanted to know everything from Neal, hold no secrets, tell no lies; he offered it first as a friend, and now begged for it, as something beyond that. But there were words and melodies inside of Neal he wasn’t ready to share with anyone, not even his best friend.

He focused on one of those melodies now, with a driving, disharmonic guitar beat, jumbled and unbalanced, raw. With the pen poised awkwardly in his right hand, Neal flexed the fingers of his left; even if he could not play the chords, he could feel them in his fingers, and his heart, the memories refusing to ever leave.

>   
> _The splinter in my hand is always there to remind me  
>  To show how the past can tear me down--_

His mind was lost in the fog of thoughts, wondering what grit Andy’s voice would have to take on to get the climate of the words right, if he  ever could. Neal was so wrapped up in the memory of Andy’s voice, he nearly missed the sound of army boots stomping angrily toward him, two feet clearly on a mission. 

Hastily he hid the music underneath his bedsheets, knowing that David would ask questions if he saw the distinctive sheet music, not wanting to answer any of them. But when he looked up at the advancing army boots, attached to a surly, scowling soldier barely recognizable from the lighthearted David Cook, Neal realized his music might have been the least of his problems.

David approached with an alarmingly fast pace, one Neal wasn’t accustomed to seeing from his fellow soldier and friend, least of all in the field hospital. An armful of papers accompanied David’s cold glare, and as he reached Neal’s bedside the top of the stack slammed down onto Neal’s lap, David’s frown wholly unapologetic.

Before Neal could even balk at David’s rudeness, a finger pointed accusingly at the papers, David’s voice unwavering in his command. “ _Fix it._ ”

Neal’s shoulders started rising in a shrug, fully planning to feign ignorance, but his ruse was over the moment he glanced down at David’s papers. He’d be a fool to try to pretend he didn’t recognize the handwriting.

“You stealin’ my penpal, Cook?” he played it off lightly, forcing a smirk, when in his mind he was anything but amused.

David shook his head, a little too adamant; that hadn’t been his intentions, and he wished to right it now. “I sent that first letter because you _couldn’t_ ,” he reminded Neal.

“Yeah, and you _shouldn’t_ have,” Neal grumbled back, still sore over David taking it upon himself to write that letter, let Andy know what was wrong. He resented the breach of privacy to David’s face, but each time he mentioned it with a sneer on his lips, David just shot back a satisfied smile and insisted one day, Neal would thank him for it.

He pointed to the letter in Neal’s lap again. “But this? This mess belongs with you.” David’s face darkened as Neal picked up Andy’s letter, scanning it quickly, wondering why Andy might have suddenly decided to make a letter-writing buddy out of David Cook. “I’ve got enough shit in my own life to deal with to manage the shit you cause, too.”

Neal’s head shot up, startled and quick to find offense. “What shit?” he retorted, his hand clenching around the letter. “Th’fuck are you talking about?”

“Read the letter,” David instructed him, arms crossed in front of his chest. “Your brilliant plan of ignoring shit and saying everything’s fine is not going swell, Neal.”

Still grumbling, Neal took a more detailed inventory the letter, skimming over the pleasantries and polite small talk Neal was so unaccustomed to seeing in Andy’s hand. A small smile crossed his face, content in the fact that Andy was only callous and candid with Neal. But that smile soon faded when he looked at the main body of the letter.

> _I’ve been getting letters back from Neal now, and it relieves me more than I can say. But...I still have this worrying feeling. He’s telling me everything’s alright and he’s not really hurt bad, but it doesn’t seem to match up with what you told me in your letter. And out of the two of you, I’d bet Neal’s got more of a motive to hide how bad he’s really wounded. I can’t ask him outright, it would hurt his ego too much--and, to be truthful, it hurts mine, too, to call him out and ask if he’s lying to me. But his stories just don’t add up. At this point I’m less concerned about his actual fucking hand and more about the fact he wants to keep it from me._
> 
> _So, just...please, David, anything you can tell me, it’s real appreciated. And don’t let Neal know about this, it’ll just send him through the damn roof--_

“Well, he’s fucking right about one thing!” Neal’s grip tightened on the letter until it trembled, his temper quick to rise. “Can’t _believe_ he’d think I’m lying to him--and to ask  you about it!” He shook his head, remembering how he had revealed so much to Andy in his letters over the past year, and all the more he laid bare during his free leave in Tulsa. “After...after everything--”

David arched a skeptical eyebrow. “You are lying to him,” he reminded Neal harshly, believing, much like the military doctors there, that the best medicine was bitter yet effective.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have to accuse me of it!”

Sighing deeply, David pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, keeping his own anger in check. He hadn’t come back to the hospital simply to be yelled at by the soldier he considered his best friend. He was, as always it seemed, the messenger. “You dug your own hole on this,” he said, holding up a hand to stem Neal’s inevitable protest. Fuck, if he were this stubborn back home, David had no idea how Andy put up with him. “You get yourself out.”

Neal’s chin jut out in quiet defiance. “Dammit, you’d stop breathing just to spite your lungs, wouldn’t you,” David said. Imploring him didn’t seem to work; yelling at him merely sent Neal charging in the opposite direction, hungry for an argument. David was spending too much energy on Neal’s problems, and though he cared about him, he simply had no more energy left to spare. His own life--torn between his body on the front lines and his heart breaking back in Missouri--had already seen to that.

“You have to tell Andy about the hand, sooner or later,” he reasoned with Neal, who, very carefully, held up his left hand and slowly lowered three of his fingers and the thumb to his palm, leaving one erect for David. He chose to ignore it, and instead held up one of the other papers in his hands. “‘Cause he’s gonna find out...whether you want him to or not.”

The second letter fell into Neal’s lap, the typewritten words and heavy, premium quality paper a stark contrast to Andy’s scrawl on lined pages ripped from his notebook. Neal’s eyes widened at the very sight of it, the familiar gold-embossed seal at the letter’s head catching his breath and his attention. He almost didn’t have to read through the letter to know its contents, and unconsciously his jaw dropped open in incredulous shock.

“Bronze Star, Purple Heart...” David ticked off the awards on his fingers before Neal could even get to reading them on the page. “They’re sending you off with the works, Tiemann.”

As Neal’s eyes pored over the page, he saw the accolades David mentioned, pictured the shiny metals the army gave out like C-rations pinned onto his chest, like new tattoos against a foreign green canvas. But all his eyes could focus on was the DD-214 discharge code at the top of the page, and the date listed only a week from now when good ol’ Uncle Sam informed him he’d be going...

“Home,” he whispered, ghosting his injured fingers across the embossed seal, pressing them to his skin to make sure it was real. “They’re sending me home.”

David couldn’t stop his smile from spreading as he watched the expression change on his best friend’s face, from defensive and cold to open, a warming light breaking through his walls from within. He couldn’t even recall the last time Neal smiled like that, lifting the gloom hanging overtop his shoulders ever since he had been brought to the hospital. Perhaps there was hope for happiness within him yet--perhaps there was for them all.

“They’re citing medical reasons,” David pointed out, inching closer to Neal’s bedside, hoping the discharge letter distracted enough from his soreness before. “Looks like someone reported your hand’s too fucked up to hold your gun.”

The emphasis on the word “someone” wasn’t lost on either soldier; there had only been one doctor assigned to Neal’s case since he had entered the field hospital, just one doctor in charge of that hand and all the paperwork that went with it. “Guess the Aussie was good for something,” Neal said, holding up his injured hand to examine Doctor Michael Johns’ handiwork. He looked over to David, remembering the frostiness that passed between his doctor and his friend early in his treatment. “You still on the outs with him?” he asked.

Though David’s grin faltered a bit at the mention of Johns, it didn’t fail altogether; he shrugged, as men discussing their feelings often do, and told Neal they reconciled.

A wicked smirk crossed Neal’s face, his discharge letter almost acting as an amulet, dispelling the gloom from his hospital bed. “Was the make-up sex good?” he joked, tossing David a wink.

Finally a chuckle rose from David’s chest, reaching the creased corners of his eyes. “Fuck you,” he shot back, still laughing.

“No thanks, I can take care of that on my own.” They were both laughing now, a lightheartedness rising up in Neal’s chest like he hadn’t felt in weeks, his mood instantly transformed the moment he received word he could go home, and leave Vietnam behind. He dropped his left hand down onto his crotch and through the blankets gave himself a squeeze. “I _can_ still ‘hold my gun.’”

Their second round of laughter left David leaning on the railing of Neal’s bed, holding on for balance as the laughs overtook his body, and Neal nearly toppling over it. With just a minute’s time and a lewd joke or three and the two soldiers went from a shouting argument to slapping each other’s backs, the closest of friends once more. David shouldn’t have doubted it. “I talked to him,” he explained, once their laughs died down and the rest of the hospital stopped staring at them as if they were aliens. “Once I saw I was being a dick about basically nothing.” He shrugged, a strange smile playing on his face. “I just realized...life’s too short for all the petty shit.”

A silence grew between them, with David rubbing at his nose and looking in every direction but Neal’s, hiding the fact that his eyes were wet; and with Neal, a sympathetic expression on his face, knowing what was wrong but unable to find the words. He was rarely at a loss, as Andy always used to admire in him, but this was a situation even the songwriter in him couldn’t find the right words to help. “Dave...” he said softly, but as soon as he began David shook his head fiercely, refusing to let Neal talk. David wasn’t done quite yet.

“That goes for you, too,” he said, still avoiding Neal’s gaze, already knowing his glassy eyes were past the point of disguise. “You’re being so goddamn stubborn with Andy, and for what? He’s going to find out about that hand anyway.” He reached out and gently poked at the bandage around Neal’s wrist, still feeling his friend wince at the contact, that shadow of pain always remaining with him. “Better it come from your mouth than his own eyes.”

“Or someone else’s letter,” Neal mumbled, but he sighed, his will deflated. He examined his hand again, trying to will away the hole in his wrist and the shards of the bullet he knew was still lodged underneath his skin; trying to will away the ambush all together, and his entire existence in Vietnam at that.

“You’re right,” he finally admitted, albeit through gritted teeth, and David smiled, knowing how difficult it was for Neal to even make that admission. “Andy’s not stupid; he’s figured out something’s up already. Probably wants to kick my ass the minute I step foot back in Tulsa.” He closed his eyes, allowing his imagination to touch briefly on what else Andy might want to do to him once he returned home. Oh, it would have something to do with ass, all right...

But then he opened them again, a pang of guilt stabbing into his chest. His spirits had improved ever since David dropped that discharge letter into his lap, the moment he knew there was an end to this war for him, a date he would be going home for good. But he remembered all too painfully he would be the only one coming home. “I’m sorry,” Neal said, shaking his head at his rudeness. “Here I am all excited to go home--I’m fucking _complaining_ about it, shit--and you--” He looked up at David, the messenger of all his news, good and bad, over the past few weeks. Neal felt bile in his throat when he thought of David out on the battlefield, abandoned, alone. He said it again, the guilt building in his voice. “I’m sorry.”

Neal expected David to tell him it would be all right with the ease only David Cook had, exaggerating that somehow, though his heart would be utterly shattered at Neal’s departure, he would find some way to move on. But he received none of that, saw no humor in David’s eyes; even his expression was blank, a grim frown giving nothing away. “I’m what? Not going home?” David took a deep breath, his lip quivering as he exhaled. “You’d think that, wouldn’t you.”

It was then that he picked up the third set of papers in his hands, the third letter to be delivered, but not to Neal. And it was then that Neal realized there may have been worse alternatives in this life to fighting in a war.

David handed the letter to Neal, its paper and embossed seal identical to the one already in Neal’s hands, but its content was much, much different. “Oh, Dave, no...” he said, quickly scanning the letter, seeing the stark differences between it and his DD-214, the medical notarization missing, a different kind of document attached than the report Johns had filed about Neal’s hand. “You’re being discharged...but--”

“They’re sending me home,” David nodded, and the tears he had been holding in finally began to fall. “I have to bury my brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song lyrics are from the song "Splinter" from MWK's album [Judging A Bullet](http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mwk).


End file.
